HACKER Q&A
📣 xsoul

Do you pay someone to install self-hosted apps?


Last week I set up a self-hosted private analytics app following the project's Github readme, it took me more than 2 hours to get it working properly. I'm not really into devops. I thought it took too long, and maybe I could have hired someone to do it for me.

Do you set up all of your self-hosted apps? Do you know if there's a place to hire people to set things up for you? Would you pay for somebody to do that? Is there any security concern?

  👤 XCSme Accepted Answer ✓
I am actually building a self-hosted application and this is a really big question/problem. In a perfect world, you could go to any hosting platform and with one click you should be able to install any software you want (as you do on mobile with apps).

I am trying to find a solution for this, but so far most of my clients have at least some technical knowledge, the rest are a bit afraid, as you mentioned, to waste too much time on trying to install something.

I also talked to some folks at DigitalOcean to ask on an easier way for a developer to install the software for the clients, on the clients own DO account. Unforunately all the solutions they provided were either really complicated or involved access to the clients account, thus imposing a high security risk. I told them it would be really cool if I could send a link to the client that automatically create the server with all the configuration needed, without them having to press any other buttons or run any commands.

Slightly off-topic: What self-hosted analytics app did you install? You could also check out the one I built[0], I focused a lot on making installation as easy as possible.

[0]: https://www.usertrack.net

👤 actionowl
Don't forget that most Unix-like operating systems and Linux distributions use package managers, typically one installs the package then configures some number of config files to get the thing up and running. Some are working right after the install. The problem with packaging web applications is that most don't take into consideration things like File System Hierarchies and are very difficult to package. If you have any sort of application and want it to be easy to install, make it easy to package (even closed source apps can benefit.) or package it yourself.

Anytime I have to install some software (AWS' agents such as inspector and cloudwatch are particularly bad about this) and I have to extract some tarball or curl into `sh` I cringe. RPM/Apt/etc is right there, ready for you to use! Signature verification, config file handling, etc!

👤 searchableguy
Check out cloudron: https://cloudron.io/
👤 wprapido
I was both paying and getting paid to install self-hosted apps. Some of them at best are time consuming to install. Also you might run into compatibility issues of all kinds
👤 ternarybash
If you're using a bare droplet or packaged container they offer, couldn't you just just set up an ansible script? Although, I might be over simplifying your uses.
👤 segmondy
did you check if it had a docker install? there are lots of self-hosted apps you can just install with containers.