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118

Getting worn out with all these docker images and CLI hosted apps (reddthat.com)

submitted 15 hours ago by mrnobody@reddthat.com to c/selfhosted@lemmy.world

66 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Anyone else just sick of trying to follow guides that cover 95% of the process, or maybe slightly miss a step and then spend hours troubleshooting setups just to get it to work?

I think I just have too much going in my "lab" the point that when something breaks (and my wife and/or kids complain) it's more of a hassle to try and remember how to fix or troubleshoot stuff. I lightly document myself cuz I feel like I can remember well enough. But then it's a style to find the time to fix, or stuff is tested and 80%completed but never fully used because life is busy and I don't have loads of free time to pour into this stuff anymore. I hate giving all that data to big tech, but I also hate trying to manage 15 different containers or VMs, or other services. Some stuff is fine/easy or requires little effort, but others just don't seem worth it.

I miss GUIs with stuff where I could fumble through settings to fix it as is easier for me to look through all that vs read a bunch of commands.

Idk, do you get lab burnout? Maybe cuz I do IT for work too it just feels like it's never ending...

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[–] chrash0@lemmy.world 17 points 13 hours ago (3 children)

honestly, i 100% do not miss GUIs that hopefully do what you want them to do or have options grayed out or don’t include all the available options etc etc

i do get burnout, and i suffer many of the same symptoms. but i have a solution that works for me: NixOS

ok it does sound like i gave you more homework, but hear me out:

with NixOS and flakes you have a commit history for your lab services, all centralized in one place.
this can include as much documentation as you want: inline comments, commit messages, living documents in your repository, whatever
even services that only provide a Docker based solution can be encapsulated and run by Nix, including using an alternate runtime like podman or containerd
(this one will hammer me with downvotes but i genuinely do think that:) you can use an LLM agent like GitHub Copilot to get you started, learn the Nix language and ecosystem, and create Nix modules for things that need to be wrapped. i’ve been a software engineer for 15 years; i’ve got nothing to prove when it comes to making a working system. what i want is a working system.

[–] plc@feddit.dk 2 points 9 hours ago

Selfhoster on NixOS here too.

Nix (and operating services on a NixOS machine) is a learning curve, and even though tho project is over 10 years old now the semantic differences between the conventional approach to distro design/software development/ops is still a source of friction. But the project has come a long way and lots of popular software is packaged and hostable and just works (when you are aware of said semantic differences)

But when it works, and it often it does, it's phenomenal and a very well integrated experience.

The problem in my exparience with using LLMs to assist is that the declarative nature of Nix makes them prone to hallucination: "Certainly, just go services.fooService.enable = true; in your configuraton.nix and you're off to the races". OTOH, because nix builds are hermetic and functional they're pretty safe to include as a verification tool that something like Claude code can use to iterate on a solution.

There are some pretty good examples of selfhosting system configurations one can use as inspiration. I just discovered github.com/firecat53/nixos that is an excellent example of a modular system configuration that manages multiple machines, secrets, and self hosted services.

[–] mrnobody@reddthat.com 2 points 11 hours ago

I will check that out even though, yes is homework lol.

And +1 for the contribution to help a stranger out!

[–] smiletolerantly@awful.systems 1 points 10 hours ago

Lost me at LLMs. My Nix config is over 20k lines long at this point, neatly split into more than a hundred modules and managing 8 physical machines and 30+ VMs. I love it.

But every time I've tried to use an LLM for nix, it has failed spectacularly.