Yunohost has been recommended to me a couple of years ago and this is a software that brought me into #selfhosting.

Thanks to Yunohost’s application catalog, I got familiar with quite a few interesting applications, learnt about their capabilities, and I still use many of them today, such as Hedgedoc and Wallabag. In addition, Yunohost makes it easy to manage domains or reverse proxies. I currently work as SysOps/SysAdmin/DevOps and when I choose to deploy an application, I opt for something I have more control over, but without yunohost I would never have stepped into this career path. I continue to use yunohost on my main server, which is a bastion of stability for me, but I test new apps and host them on a separate server. In Yunohost, on the other hand, I install the Redirect application to conveniently have access to them outside my network.

Yunohost is okayish. Some apps sadly are badly maintained and therefore upgraded with more delay than I considered acceptable (but that has improved afaik)and integration into a single “look and feel” is a bit lacking. Nevertheless it’s solid in the end.

If you are willing to pay something Cloudron may be an alternative for you as well - very well maintained product, good support team and rock solid from my experience - and it’s a non-US/non-China company. (German to be exact) But it costs money for more than 2 applications. I nevertheless went with them - I don’t self host as a hobby, I self-host because I want shit to work. Between job and family I have no time to fiddle around with things and keep everything updated on a short notice. I have project where I can do that, but they are not something my family or myself depend on. (And they integrate nicely with Cloudron as you can add “custom” Apps/use it as a proxy and OpenID Provider)

I was searching for something like this! Seems really promising, I’ll check it, thanks!

I really like it. Yes, you have way more control by using docker/nixos/etc of course, but for things like seafile or nextcloud, yunohost does the good ol’ 80% job with 20% of the effort and time, at least for me.

yunotryityourself?

Been using it for 10+ years. Love it.

Elena Rossini, well known for her help in growing the Fediverse, raves about Yunohost, https://news.elenarossini.com/my-year-of-fediverse-explorations/. You should be fine using it.

@[email protected]

Yes, it’s pretty good! I’m a DevOps engineer, and have experience with Ansible, Docker, etc, but I just couldn’t find time to deploy services the best way that I wanted™ for my personal server

So, even though it e.g. doesn’t even use Docker, yunohost really helped me start using the many services I wanted/needed, which otherwise might take e.g. a few hours to a couple of days for each of them to research and configure

So I have one “production” yunohost server, one “testing” yunohost server to test services that I don’t know if I’ll use yet (and I wouldn’t want them to interfere with production e.g. by using too many resources)

and one server without yunohost for mailu, Docker, traefik, etc, which I can use to deploy services the correct way™ as I figure out the services that I really use and find the time to migrate them one-by-one

Even when using yunohost, there are so many things to do after deploying a service (e.g. DNS, configure the server and client software), so it has been really useful to save time when deploying and configuring.

I think it gets you ~80% there, makes self-hosting accessible to everyone, and helps democratize the Internet a bit 💚 It’s more important to have many people setting up e.g. Immich or Nextcloud for their family photos, than only a few Linux people being able to learn how to do it perfectly (Docker/kubernetes high availability, reverse proxies, etc) and have everyone else to need to resort to using centralized services

Umbrel, Cosmos Cloud, Caprover, Yacht, Dokku, there’s a billion of these things.

Elena Rossini (@[email protected]) is a journalist who’s gotten into the fediverse and self hosting with Yuno Host. She’s documented it on her blog. It’s worked out really well for her.

Des, it has, what most others lack: Single Sign In and many Apps.

not myself, but my stepdad tried it with 2 decades of IT and linux sysadmin experience.

basically, it is great if you want to host like 2 or 3 standalone services on a pi to get into understanding how the basics of selfhosting work, but for homelabs and deep customization, you’re better off with docker compose on debian/ubuntu server.

Never heard of it till now, now I’m going to try it out!

I’ve used it when I started out and it’s good, I can recommend it if you just want something where you can hit install and it works. I just use docker containers now though because I have more experience and it allows to set everything up exactly how I want.

I did some testing with it, because I believe more people should be able to self-host.

I like how it is implemented. It has good support for email. Many apps support SSO.

The critical part to me is how up-to-date applications are. I started a small project to automate version tracking, check out:

https://alexpdp7.github.io/selfhostwatch/app/nextcloud.html

; so for example, the YunoHost Nextcloud app does not lag much behind upstream. My intention with this is to let people see that they have been updating Nextcloud dilligently for two years; they might pull the plug tomorrow, but it’s a good track record.

(I’d like to add scrapers to other projects similar to YunoHost. My ultimate goal would be to be able to choose a list of apps you’d like to self-host, and see which projects like YunoHost carry the applications you want, and compare how they track updates.)