See you soon!

— eve ☆

So I had this old Acer Aspire laptop just sitting in my basement doing absolutely nothing and I thought wait, what if I turned it into a home server and self-hosted my website on it? how hard could it be, I can just keep this running always and voila.

The answer is: very. very, very hard. but also incredibly rewarding and I learned so much.

Le beginning: Ubuntu server install

I first had to install Ubuntu Server 24.04 on it. Simple right? NO, wrong. my acer laptop is a stupid model that makes things harder and its NVMe drive wasn't being detected by linux so no installation is possible. It turns out all I had to do was go into the BIOS and change the storage mode to UEFI AHCI in a special setting that had to be enabled with a key combination which I stubbornly thought didn't exist. Other than that I was trying literally every other thing on my BIOS haha... all of that took me embarassingly longer to figure out than I'd like to admit.

Once Ubuntu and internet was running I installed Coolify, which is my choice self-hosting platform that manages Docker containers for you. You can point it at your GitHub repo source code and it just deploys your site. :D

Except first I couldn't even access the Coolify dashboard from my PC. I spent a while debugging before realizing the port forwarding on my Nokia router was pointing to the wrong machine oops :3.

The domain situation was crazy:

If you've noticed I have this domain with japanese characters. eve.みんな. yes it's in Japanese. and it caused some issues.

turns out Traefik (the reverse proxy that routes traffic) absolutely cannot handle Japanese characters in domain names. it works only with ASCII and the fix was to use the punycode version of the domain instead: eve.xn--q9jyb4c. Tbh, I think the punycode's cool in its own way.

once everything was working I thought I was done. I was not done. a few things I learned the hard way:

• Your home public IP can change randomly and your site just goes down. no warning. just gone.
• Ubuntu's /etc/resolv.conf can get wiped and suddenly nothing resolves. I had to set a permanent DNS fix through systemd-resolved.
• WiFI is unstable for a server. the iwlwifi driver on this laptop kept throwing errors. I ended up switching to ethernet.
• your laptop's local IP can also change, breaking all your port forwarding rules. I had to set a static IP through nmcli to fix this permanently.

what I set up along the way

• UFW firewall with only the ports I actually need open
• Block brute force attempts
• Disable root SSH login
• automatic security updates
• Uptime monitoring so I know when the site goes down
• GitHub webhook so every push to main auto-deploys
• Permanent DNS

In the end I got this site to stably run on a laptop, on my home internet, with my domain, with SSL, with auto-deploys! I own the whole stack. no monthly hosting fees, just me and my little server humming away!~ :3

— eve ☆