Docker
I recently switched to Brave after getting sick of trying to configure media playback to work in a reasonable way on Firefox. I don’t like everything about Brave, but with a bit of tweaking, it makes for a good, relatively Google-free, browser.
There’s little to no documentation on how to self-host the Brave Sync Server, which allows to synchronize bookmarks, tabs, settings and much more between devices.
The sync server, like the browser itself, is open source and can be found here: https://github.com/brave/go-sync.
I’m running a Docker host on a Hetzner Cloud server. Since my GitLab instance grew quite big, I bought some additional storage that’s mounted to the machine as a
additional device. All my Docker stuff uses local volumes located in /var/lib/docker/volumes. The question now was: How to move those volumes to the new storage?
Docker volumes are basically just subdirectories in a special folder. For some applications it’s important to copy over all the extended attributes and other metadata
like permissions, ownership and change dates.
I’m working on an application where I use Docker and docker-compose to orchestrate a NodeJS container running my backend
and a MongoDB container for my database. Using Docker for Mac, I’ve seen drastic slowdowns
when initially establishing the database connection. When I used a Linux host, everything was extremely smooth. Since
Docker for Mac creates a xhyve-based virtual machine running a Linux with the Docker daemon inside, I initially thought
that this is just the usual slow in-VM performance compared to running Docker natively on the host system.
In this article I will show you how to set up a Firefox Sync Server as a Docker container. In my case this will replace iCloud Bookmark / Tab synchronization. This article is part of the byeCloud series in which I try to replace iCloud with self-hosted services.
I’ve evaluated different solutions to synchronize tabs and bookmarks, but none of them seemed to satisfy my needs. Firefox Sync almost does. Originally, I wanted to use Chromium with some plugin that would allow me to self-host a bookmark sync service. While there is a working solution called Unmark which also has a Chrome extension that works in general, the open source version lacks HTML bookmark import functionality and seems not to be the best possible software quality after a quick review (in fact I implemented a HTML bookmark to Unmark JSON converter to import my bookmarks but even their JSON import code drove me crazy).
For some months now I’m running a private GitLab server. I really enjoy using it, especially with all the great
features like the Docker Container Registry and GitLab Pages to host static pages, even with own domains.
Normally I would prefer a more lightweight solution, such as Gitea but GitLab has so many
advantages that, at least for me, this is currently the only way to go.
However, it felt tedious setting it up, even with Docker. You have to configure GitLab to serve stuff using plain HTTP,
provide different ports for different apps to be able to create own vhosts in the reverse proxy and so on.
So I decided to quickly write up what I did to get it working. Maybe I’m wrong and there’s a much easier way to do it
but I couldn’t find it. Additionally, in the meanwhile I switched from Caddy as a reverse proxy to
Traefik since it can attach directly to the Docker daemon, listens to changes in the domain
configuration, request new HTTPS certificates on the fly while new containers are spawned and - best of all - I don’t need
a separate configuration file. So the guide this time is still using Docker and docker-compose, but Traefik instead of Caddy.
But you can basically use any reverse proxy to set it up, like nginx-proxy.
In this article I will show you how to set up your own RSS feed aggregator with sync support for many third-party clients through the Fever API as a replacement for Apple News/Google News/Feedly. This article is part of the byeCloud series in which I try to replace iCloud with self-hosted services.
Choosing the right software
I fiddled around for a while with the News app for Nextcloud, ttr-rss and a few other alternatives, but ended up with Miniflux (now in version 2) because it is simple and lightweight and provides the most important thing for me, a Fever-compatible API without any plugins. Fever is a self-hosted but closed-source and paid RSS feed aggregator that has integration in quite a few third-party clients. Luckily, Miniflux provides a API that implements the Fever specs, meaning that it can be used with clients that support Fever, in my case this is Reeder for macOS and iOS, probably the best news reader you can get ;-)
UPDATE Apr, 17 2018: Update imapsync to run as standalone docker container to make deployment easier.
In this article I will show you how to set up a fully-featured mail server including webmail as a Docker container. This article is part of the byeCloud series in which I try to replace iCloud with self-hosted services.
Let’s be honest: Setting up a mailserver really is a pain in the ass. Always. There are so many components involved, on a pretty standard setup starting from Dovecot and Postfix to Amavis, OpenDKIM, ClamAV, postgrey and much more. Getting all those components working together and, even more important, create a secure configuration for a mailserver is a work that often takes days to weeks until you have a final setup. And if you have gotten everything running, it’s a mess to update because you are in dependency hell, versions will conflict and stop working while in production.
In this article I will show you how I set up my photo synchronization using Nextcloud. This article is part of the byeCloud series in which I try to replace iCloud with self-hosted services.
One of the most important things in my setup is a solid and reliable way to synchronize Photos and videos I take. In one of the previous parts of this series I set up my Nextcloud instance. So this this time is easy: It’s just about getting all of files out of the new Photos.app and uploading it using the ownCloud sync client.
In this article I will describe how I set up my Nextcloud instance aiming to replace iCloud Drive. This article is part of the byeCloud series in which I try to replace iCloud with self-hosted services.
The goals for a file syncing infrastructure are simple
- I want a reliable solution that syncs files as-is,
- that does not corrupt them
- and does not cancel uploads all the time.
- Additionally, I want to be able to access my files on the go using a mobile app, as well as having files on my local hard disk to also be able to use it offline, just in case I have no network connection.
- Files should be stored again as raw files on the file system so that I can back them up easily.
As it turns out, Nextcloud offers a solid file syncing mechanism. There are many people that say it is somehow unreliable and slow. I cannot reproduce that properties, for me it works great - maybe because I’m not syncing files of the size of modern hard drives. For me, it’s more about documents, images, some videos shot on my phone and so on.
If you encounter any problems, please check the up-to-date documentation at https://github.com/dprandzioch/docker-ddns .
In some projects I need access to various hosts with a dynamic IP from time to time. Dyndns services offer a great solution by providing a DNS with records that are updated by the clients once their IP addresses change.
There are various existing services out there that are either free or paid, but if you want to self-host a dyndns service, you have to set up a DNS by your own as well as some endpoint that your clients can connect to in order to update their records.
