My documentation is a folder with the docker compose files I am using. And some notes in Nextcloud Notes if needed.

My reverse proxy is Traefik, since it’s docker aware. :)

StandardNotes for me

So I want to get back into self hosting, but every time I have stopped is because I have lack of documentation to fix things that break. So I pose a question, how do you all go about keeping your setup documented? What programs do you use?

Joplin or Obsidian? Or… plain markdown files with your favorite text editor.

I’m writing documentation in obsidian. I then expose it to the web so I can access from all my devices and share to others with quartz. Everything is markdown. It’s tunneled out of my network with cloudflare tunnels, which do handle SSL for me.

One day, I moved all services I really wanted from a couple of random VPS to a nice little proxmox machine at home (and then added some more services, of course). That was the day I swore to document stuff better, and I’m pretty satisfied with how well I was able to keep up with that.

In the proxmox web interface, you can leave notes per container. I note down which service the container is running including a link to the service’s web interface if applicable, plus the source, and a note about how it auto-updates (green check mark emoji) or if it requires manual updates (handiman emoji).

Further I made a concious effort to document everything into a gollum wiki running on that proxmox host (exposes a wiki like web interface, stores all entries as plaintext .md files into a local git repo - very “portable”). Most importantly, it also includes a page of easy to understand emergency measures in case I die or become unresponsive, which I regularly print out and put into a folder with other important documents. The page contains a QR code linking to itself on the wiki too in case the printed version might be outdated here or there.

The organization of the wiki itself (what goes into which folder) is a bit of a work in progress, but as it offers full text search, that’s not too much of a problem imo.

My documentation problem was largely fixed by using Nixos. The actual OS instances are self-documenting that way.

As far as the documentation for the network setup itself goes, a simple wiki does the rest of the trick for me.

I have a couple Libre Office files where I document the non-technical stuff for my own quick reference, like network layout in Draw, or IP and port assignments in Calc. I use a git repo to store and organize podman scripts, systemd unit files, configs, etc. Probably not the most elegant solution, but it’s simple and FOSS.

Reverse proxy is Nginx Proxy Manager.

I use nginx for reverse proxy. You can get certbot working to automate ssl fairly easily. There is a learning curve, but most services I use have documentation for hosting their stuff with it.

i recently made the switch from doing k3s+flux to have everything in code with bundlewrap and anemos/makeimg

Wiki.js Nginx Proxy Manager.

I use markdown text files which are synced to my nextcloud instance.

This is somewhat tangential to your post, but I think using infrastructure as code and declarative technologies is great for reliability because you aren’t just running a bunch of commands until something works, you have the code which tells you exactly how things are set up, and you can version control it to roll back to a working state. The code itself can be a form of documentation in that case.

I write everything in markdown, and I mean just about everything. Tech notes, recipes, work procedures, shopping lists…everything. If you check my comment history from today, you can see a quick example of the kind of tech notes I keep (firewalld in this case).

I keep all of my plain text files synced across multiple devices using Syncthing. For desktop editors, I use mostly vim and VSCodium (though Kate is nice too), and I use Markor on Android. This workflow has been highly efficient for many years now, and I no longer waste time constantly reviewing the latest note-taking app.

I have an Ansible playbook that I use to setup everything and all troubleshooting steps I ever had to take to fix something get written down in an Obsidian.md vault.

I run a k3s cluster for selfhosted apps and keep all the configuration and docs in a git repo. That way I have history of changes and can rollback if needed. In that repo I have a docs folder with markdown documents about common operations and runbooks.

There are other ways to do this, but I like keeping docs next to the code and config so I can update them all at the same time. Deployed several wikis in the past but always forget to update them when I change things.

Right now, I’m using Obsidian. I think I’d like to transition to keeping docs in a wiki, but I worry that it’s part of the self-hosted infrastructure. In other words, if the wiki’s down, I no longer have the docs that I need to repair the wiki.