[fallenhitokiri]

I do not know of an opinionated beginners guide, but would recommend browsing r/selfhosted and r/homelab a bit. Lots of these and similar questions are answered on a regular basis.

Some starting points

- photos: NextCloud

- git: Gitea

- BitWarden: Vaultwarden (even if you deploy this locally you want a SSL certificate as clients will refuse to connect otherwise)

I'd suggest using official docker images to get started as there’s plenty documentation available for all projects and experimenting is a bit easier when you can simply dispose a container without having to worry what’ll happen to your host OS.

As long as you run services locally on your Synology (assuming it supports docker) and don’t expose them to the Internet I’d encourage you to „just give it a try“.

Just don’t immediately start to rely on the services and run a dual strategy (NextCloud and iCloud photos for example) till you updated your container once or twice and feel comfortable troubleshooting issues with your stack. Nothing is more discouraging than having a service you need „right now“ being down and no idea how to get it back up.

It’ll be a long, fun journey. Good luck!

[jve]

> - photos: NextCloud

If you don't mind horrible experience viewing photos/videos via nextcloud, go on. In my case this was unusable. Thumbnails not pregenerated even after trying (Yeah, didn't spend whole day on that issue) and generates on the fly. So viewing larger directory is... rubbish. Videos don't play as nice not to say they don't even have thumbnails. Feels like "guest book" from 2000 - no features that auto organizes stuff - just a directory with photos and you're on your own with unorganized mess of photos.

How great was HN when it suggested me https://photoprism.app/ - and it really just works! Nice, performant, featureful, yet feels lightweight. Finally I can view my photos.

I still use nextcloud just for sync and photoprism just has directory mounted as readonly. Still, sync from phone feels heavy along with "failed to sync" errors and just hangs doing nothing... I long to try out syncthing - but then I loose web access to documents which.. maybe someone can suggest some frontend for that?

Someone also suggested https://photostructure.com/ - it looks decent, haven't tried out.

[Georgelemental]

Nextcloud released a new version of their photos app a few days ago (https://nextcloud.com/blog/announcing-nextcloud-hub-3-brand-...). Haven't had the chance to try it yet though

[znpy]

What’s the difference between nextcloud hub and the good old nextcloud server?

[bklaasen]

No difference. Just a branding exercise.

Nextcloud will soon be at version 25, which will also be named Nextcloud Hub 3. Frank Karlitchek talks about this during the Q&A, about an hour and a half into the video linked below.

However there are major improvements coming in that new version, specifically to the Photos app[1]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dhJXZzqsv8A&t=1103

[mceachen]

I'm the author of PhotoStructure: AMA, or hop into our discord! https://photostructure.com/go/discord

[neurostimulant]

Plex is pretty good for viewing stored video and photos (pre-generated thumbnails and video transcoding + preview), while NextCloud is pretty good at syncing them. Install both and point plex to the synced photos and videos directory in the server.

[waynesonfire]

works fine for me

[distortedsignal]

It looks like r/selfhosted even has a wiki with some tips on getting up and running: https://wiki.r-selfhosted.com/

I've gone through some of it and it seems like a decent primer on where to start, but I'm not sure that it has all the required info that OP would want.

[yamtaddle]

> - git: Gitea

"Why gitea and not bare repos?"

- Better repo, user, and access management, all from a browser.

- LFS support.

- Being able to browse code in... well, a browser, is really nice.

- GH-like workflows generally, if you want that.

You can have it use sqlite for the DB to make it extremely easy to manage and backup and such. I'd expect that to be fine up to at least 50 moderately-active users, and maybe much higher.

[kickaha]

Fair enough. But I just want a place to put dotfiles that I can share between machines. If I had more complex needs than that, I would probably not have had to ask this question!

[sumosudo]

Chezmoi works for me

https://www.chezmoi.io/

[pdimitar]

Either a dedicated dotfile or just use Syncthing.

[albrewer]

> As long as you run services locally on your Synology (assuming it supports docker) and don’t expose them to the Internet

How do I do all this while exposing it to the internet? I want to host stuff for my friends and family without putting them on a VPN to my house.

[tgamma]

You could put your services behind a reverse proxy such as Traefik with forward-auth and expose it to port 443 (HTTPS) on your router, or (that's what I do and am happy with) use the cloudflared [1] demon to connect your services to Cloudflare where they can be protected behind Cloudflare Access using an SSO provider such as Okta (or Github or Google) for authentication. This method does not require you to expose any ports on your router and can all be done on the free/dev tiers of Cloudflare and Okta.

[1]: https://hub.docker.com/r/cloudflare/cloudflared

[fredski42]

+1 on vaultwarden. I use 2 rpi’s: one in my own house and one in the house of family. I run regular backup’s using BorgBackup. I run OpenWRT on my router with WireGuard on it. I configured my mobiles/laptops to auto-route over WireGuard to my home.