welcome to the third edition of the self-hosted weekly newsletter. Its been a quite week and while typing these sentences I am sitting in an otherwise empty office.
Email authentication: SPF, DKIM and DMARC out in the wild Link to heading
Self-Hosting e-mail is one of the most callenging topics in todays spam ridden world. JonLuca gives a nice and thourough introduction into the topics of SPF, DKIM and DMARC.
https://blog.jonlu.ca/posts/spf-dkim
Rapidly Build & Test Ansible Roles with Molecule + Docker Link to heading
I have to confess that up until now I have not really bothered with automation tools too much. I am simply not deploying enough systems to break even on the time invest (and setups are also hardly repeating itself). This blog from Percy Grunwald is a nice tutorial on how to locally build and test ansible playbooks.
A Summary of How I Automated My Server with Ansible, Docker, and Traefik Link to heading
And now follows directly a practicle example of using ansible to deploy various applications to your own server. Personally I would rather choose Caddy over traefik, but especially in relation to self-hosting this is mostly a matter of personal taste.
https://thoughtfuldragon.com/a-summary-of-how-i-automated-my-server-with-ansible-docker-and-traefik/
Keeping applications up to date Link to heading
The lifetime of an application does not step after it has been initially deployed, but keeping it up to date is an important topic as well, weh running your own services. “Infrastructure as code” can help here (which means using a tool such as ansible, puppet or chef to deploy your applications), but what when you haven’t reached this level of automation yet?
A nice tool to help here and that I am using for a number of years already is apt-dater. In the end apt-dater uses screen to connect to your servers, check if there are package upgrades and then do an interactive upgrade of the selected system.
But what about applications that do not come in package repositories? Then Release Bell may come in handy. It sends a mail notification for new release tags on Github.
Updates Link to heading
- watchtower 0.3.10 is a service that can automatically pull newer container images and restart container to use the newest version. An alternative to watchtower is ouroboros.
Do you know of a project that should be featured here? Link to heading
I am always looking for new projects to try out! Just send a mail to selfhosted-newsletter@9wd.eu.
I hope you have enjoyed this issue. If this newsletter was useful to you please recommend it to colleges or tell them to subscribe to it via RSS.
Have a nice weekend! Felix