I’ve been a Software Engineering Student for 2 years now. I understand networks and whatnot at a theoretical level to some degree.
I’ve developed applications and hosted them through docker on Google Cloud for school projects.
I’ve tinkered with my router, port forwarded video game servers and hosted Discord bots for a few years (familiar with Websockets and IP/NAT/WAN and whatnot)
Yet I’ve been trying to improve my setup now that my old laptop has become my homelab and everything I try to do is so daunting.
Reverse proxy, VPN, Cloudfare bullshit, and so many more things get thrown around so much in this sub and other resources, yet I can barely find info on HOW to set up this things. Most blogs and articles I find are about what they are which I already know. And the few that actually explain how to set it up are just throwing so many more concepts at me that I can’t keep up.
Why is self-hosting so daunting? I feel like even though I understand how many of these things work I can’t get anything actually running!
For VPN home labbing you should check out wireguard, it’s stupid simple and very powerful. Reverse proxy stuff I handle through nginx, mostly because I’m using it for web hosting anyways and I’m comfortable with the workflow. I don’t bother with cloudflare much because I host a jellyfin instance and I believe that’s against their TOS, but just take it one step at a time and you’ll figure it out in no time.
Also I can’t stress enough the ease of use of docker compose files for managing and quickly spinning up new apps.