How do you set up a server? Do you do any automation or do you just open up an SSH session and YOLO? Any containers? Is docker-compose enough for you or are you one of those unicorns who had no issues whatsoever with rootless Podman? Do you use any premade scripts or do you hand craft it all? What distro are you building on top of?
I’m currently in process of “building” my own server and I’m kinda wondering how “far” most people are going, where do y’all take any shortcuts, and what do you spend effort getting just right.
I use a heterogeneous environment with some things hosted in various cloud providers and others locally. Often times, I can usually find the package I need - but if I can’t, I usually go for Docker and docker-compose. This is often the case in Oracle Linux on OCI - where docker just makes things so much easier.
For my static stuff I just use Cloudflare Pages and forget about it.
On my homelab it is Arch Linux with my own set of scripts. I used to do VFIO gaming a lot (less now), so I had the host only be a hypervisor and used a separate Arch VM to host everything in a docker-compose stack. The VM makes my server operations a lot more tidy.
My RPI is using dietpi and is natively running the pihole software and a couple other things.
I know some folks swear by UnRaid and Proxmox, but I’ve always found those platforms limited me vs building things my way. Also borking my own system unintentionally on occasion is a thrilling opportunity to learn!