| I was in exactly your position a couple of months ago and have just got my first apps running this week! Im a web developer so had a bit of experience with containers, cli and linux but only basic web related stuff. Ill detail my journey and then let others tell you how wrong I am. I bought a thinkcenter m715q for $200ish which was suggested as a good budget starting machine. There's lots of info about this on https://reddit.com/r/homelab , https://reddit.com/r/selfhosted and https://www.servethehome.com I installed ubuntu and had a play around but then decided proxmox seemed like the way to go for what I wanted to so. So I watched a range of youtubers
https://www.youtube.com/@christianlempa
https://www.youtube.com/@TechnoTim
https://www.youtube.com/@CraftComputing who all have different series on this and related topics. Basically you burn the proxmox iso onto USB, plug it in, install it on the computer and its ready to go (obviously watch a few videos!). You need to access Proxmox from another computer on the same network through the IP address you get at the end of install. So if your router/gateway is say 198.168.0.1 you might set Proxmox as 198.168.0.99. Im still figuring the best practices on this out as obviously security is a major factor... Actually you can use a single computer but need to do something like this
https://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Developer_Workstations_with_Pro... Which worked for me but its actually more convenient to use another comp as you want to be using your normal environment to use the services. Once its up you browse to it, sign in and its ready to go. I got started by setting up plex by using this site:
https://tteck.github.io/Proxmox/
which gives you a single command to run an install script of whatever you want to install. It will install it as a LXC Container which is like Docker but less overhead. Or you can create VMs and run docker in them. This is next weeks job for me. Each container gets created as a new service with its own IP address on the network. To expose them externally creates security risks if you don't know what you are doing. So I chose to use Cloudflare Tunnels which was super easy but I use CF daily. Now i have a working Plex server at plex.<mydomain>.com and a Mattermost server at chat.<mydomain>.com ! Its super fun and you just nuke stuff if it doesnt work. Proxmox UI is easy to understand. My biggest issue was understanding how to connect external drives and share them with the containers permanently. So understanding mounting drives, permissions in linux in general and then in Proxmox
https://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Linux_Container#_bind_mount_poi... I have a massive amount to learn before I feel comfortable and secure. But totally worth the time spent so far and not as hard as expected once I decided to go down the Proxmox direction. |