I dunno why but I’m worried that casaos is holding me back from doing greater things I guess? I’m pretty new to self hosting and I discovered casaos from a Minecraft server setup tutorial of all things and it’s been great for me so far and does pretty much everything I need it to do, but I feel like I don’t really have a full understanding of what I can do outside of it, and I don’t really hear many people talk about casaos so I’m like worried it’s just not very good I guess? I’m just looking for ways to improve really.
For reference I just use my server for Minecraft on the occasion, a self hosted obsidian live sync, adguard, and in the future plan on hosting nextcloud. Casaos seems great for that and maybe it’s perfectly fine but I’d just be interested in being more knowledgeable I guess, and aware of any ways to improve.
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As some said, it’s fine!
I have it installed on my raspberry pi to run Jellyfin and a few other apps, and it’s been mostly stable. However I’ve had the same thoughts as you, so I can confirm that you won’t be able to learn as much with it.
Some of my other needs are hosted on a VPS without CasaOS, and that’s where I was able to learn most of what I know. It’s also where I spent the most time configuring and fixing incompatibilities.
I’d suggest that you keep CasaOS for the things you want to depend on, and start learning on another system without CasaOS by installing apps you’re interested to try out. This way you’ll learn about reverse proxies, certificates, docker, etc, without being afraid to mess up your current setup.
CasaOS is fine, but the downside of tools like it is you don’t really know what’s going on under the hood, so if/when something breaks it may be really hard to fix.
But if it works for you I don’t see a reason to change. Just make sure you’ve got reliable backups following the 3-2-1 rule.
Just looking at their website makes me not want to use it because it doesn’t give any details as to what it actually is.
I say spin up Proxmox, a Debian LXC, install portainer on that container, and then you have something way more customizable. You’ll learn a lot more that way.
Seconded, but dockge over portainer.
Oh yeah, Portainer just to manage Docker containers. But they should probably just start with Docker to better understand it.
Having a solution that works for you is never a bad thing.
Now it comes down to what you want to archive: Do you want something that just works? Great, you’re done - now go on and do some other things that you like, that’s perfectly fine. Or do you want to learn more about servers, virtualization, linux, networking and selfhosting in general? Then there are a million ways to get started.
I’d suggest to setup a little lab, if you haven’t already. Install Proxmox on your server and run CasaOS inside a virtual machine. Now you’ve learned about hypervisors and virtual machines. Afterwards you could create a second virtual machine to play around - maybe install debian and get used to the linux cli. Install docker manually, run some apps using docker-compose. Now you’re already doing some stuff that CasaOS does under the hood.
The possibilities are endless, the rabbit hole is deep. It can be a lot of fun, but don’t force youself to go down there if you don’t want to.
You said it yourself — you’re new to self hosting, and CasaOS fits what you want to host. As a starting point for getting rid of hosted services, go with that for a start.
Sure, you won’t immediately be getting your hands dirty mucking about with dockers and stuff, but you will have your working home server. For learning and experimentation, I second @[email protected]’s plan B — use another machine to test building the same setup on a base Linux system.
If you’re like me you probably have an old laptop lying around that wouldn’t be great as an always up, day to day server, but as a testing environment to mess around with docker containers it should be fine?
Stop worrying about stuff like this.
Does it do what you need?
Does it fail where you need it?
Then start asking that question. Don’t be OCD about it. It’s an automation suite. Chill.
