Hello everyone, and thank you for the warm community
I’ve recently discovered YunoHost while exploring the Fediverse and self-hosting in general, and I’d like to set up my own small server at home. Before I dive in, I’d love some advice from more experienced users.
A few questions on my mind:
Hardware — Is an old laptop or a Raspberry Pi 4 reasonable for a first YunoHost install, or would a small mini-PC be more reliable for long-term use?
Domain — For someone just starting out, would you recommend using a free nohost.me / noho.st domain first, or jumping straight to a custom domain?
First apps — Beyond the basics, which apps do beginners typically install first to get a feel for how YunoHost works? I’m mostly interested in personal cloud storage and a small blog.
Common pitfalls — Are there any first-time mistakes you’d warn a beginner about? (Network configuration, port forwarding, backups, etc.)
I’ve read through the documentation, but I’d really value the experience of people who’ve actually been through the first-time setup recently.
Thanks in advance for any guidance you can share. Looking forward to learning here!
Depends on your needs. I have a 20 year old netbook atom cpu with 2G ram at home for data storage. If you plan to have more apps than nextcloud and a blog, then you may need a better hardware but you can still start with what you have and upgrade later if it’s not enough.
You can start with the yunohost domains
Also depends on your needs. Have a look at the yunohost catalog for what might interest you
The docs cover most of the scenarios. But if you face something you’re welcome to ask here
I currently run YNH on a miniATX PC, but before that I was using Olimex Lime2 (R-Pi 2-3 equivalent) for many years and it was fine. And old PC/laptop will carry you quite far.
If you decided to go the R-Pi (or other ARM board) way, one thing to consider is how you will connect your hard drives. They often have few ports and typically SATA-over-USB, so if you want to use I/O intensive processes (e.g. streaming, encoding), you will likely feel that as the bottleneck.
One thing of note is that some apps will not work on 32-bit systems (e.g. Nextcloud) or specific architectures. Tpically, x86/amd64 is more widely supported than arm, but it’s not a huge gap. Check the individual app descriptions for what is (not) supported.
SW and common pitfalls
Experiment, but don’t have too many apps installed willy-nilly. Perhaps try a few overlapping apps (e.g. Wallabag and Readium) and see which one you lile more, remove the others, find a new category, repeat the process.
As for what’s popular, you can order apps.yunohost.org by popularity. I’d suggest browsing through the categories with that enabled, for inspiration, and if you have questions post them here.
Hi! Regarding documentation, I can share my cheat sheets (memos) for installing on an Olimex Lime 2 or Raspberry Pi. They’re a bit old, but they should still work
