Self-Hosting and Portainer

I have heard of Portainer via the Awesome Open Source YouTube Channel. It is an open-source tool used to manage containerized applications across various environments like Docker.

I started using this a few weeks ago as an experiment and this experiment has worked well.

Installation

Installing the Community Edition as a Docker container on my Linux VPS was a breeze because the documentation was well-written. As this was an experiment, I opted for plugging it in to the Docker installation my VPS already had at the time.

The Fun Part: Deploying Apps

Ever since I’ve had Portainer, I managed to install and deploy several self-hosted open-source apps without even logging in via SSH.

Most of these I’ve installed to try them out and I am still trying to figure out how and if I want to be using them more regularly.

I mean, they’re microapps so they do one thing and do that one thing well so there’s not much exciting things to say?

Gitea

For example, I’ve always wanted to install gitea, a self-hosted software development service as a potential replacement for Github. While I managed to indeed install it and even add a random test repo, I did not manage to connect via SSH. If I remember well, the problem was partly due to the fact that I was using Cloudflare as a proxy.

I went into this in a it could be cool if it works mode and not like I really need this to work mode. Otherwise, I would have probably taken the time to fix it. Nonetheless, since I spent so little effort and time deploying this, I did not feel as frustrated as I would have done all of this manually on the terminal.

Once you know how Docker works, it makes sense to use a wrapper around it to make deploying easier.

FreshRSS

Installing FreshRSS was fairly straightforward. I am still trying to understand how it works so perhaps I’ll get back to this when I finally replace Feedly with this one.

Jupyter Notebook

Installing Jupyter Notebook was also mostly straightforward. Jupyter Notebook is single user and I think if I wanted more users and a more complete installation, I should be using Jupyter Lab. But since there will only be at most two users for this Jupyter Notebook (Pierre and me), it should be enough.

Paperless

Paperless NGX was also fairly straightforward to install using Portainer. It’s a document management system which I use mainly so that I can have my documents searchable.