lemon's site

Transitioning to self-hosting

1 May 2026 — #web #self-hosting

I have migrated this site from Codeberg Pages (and before that, sourcehut pages1) to a VPS. This is something I've been considering for a long time and finally got around to it this week, in no small part encouraged by recent discourse (see: one, two, three).

Git

I already moved off GitHub many years ago, seeing the, uh, direction, it was taking after the Microsoft acquisition... I remember when GitHub used to be a good example of a lightweight website, but much ink has been spilled already on its overall degradation (see above, also four).

I've also set up my server to host my git repos, inspired by the post Git without a forge. This amounts to a bunch of bare repos and cgit as a frontend.

However, for now I will continue using Codeberg for public projects for exposure, reachability, ease for potential contributors, etc.

Setup

This site and everything in this domain is running in a cheap VPS (1 vCPU, 1GB RAM) with nginx. Using Tailscale, I can very easily access it remotely. I use Zola for the static site, building it on my computer and scp'ing the generated HTML over to the remote server2.

For the git 'server', I created a git user with its home in /srv/git/, where the bare repos live. This gives me write access to it via ssh with a remote like git@<VPS tailnet IP>:<repo name>. I have the actual VPS firewalled to reject all traffic except for HTTP (port 80) and HTTPS (port 443), so I can only SSH to it via tailscale, which is good for security (probably). I also support regular HTTPS cloning. For the frontend I use cgit as mentioned. It integrates easily with nginx, is lightweight, and has a configurable cache. I've lightly customised its CSS.

TODOs, Future Plans

  1. Contingency measures to deal with higher traffic load (nginx cache? rate limiting? anti-crawler blockers (Anubis? Iocaine?).

  2. Performance/load monitoring tools (Grafana?).

  3. A personal fediverse server, considering some lightweight options:

    • Akkoma, well established. Elixir + postgres.
    • GoToSocial, more frugal. Go + sqlite/postgres.
    • snac, very minimalistic. C + UNIXy filesystem-based DB.

  4. Run the actual server locally (I have an old Raspberry Pi around, or an old laptop..) and keep the VPS just as a reverse proxy that essentially tunnels the local server over tailscale, maybe with caching and anti-bot filters on top of that. That way I get to run the server locally without exposing my home IP. I like the idea of my servers being something I can physically access.

  1. And before that, GitHub Pages. I gotta keep this one around for something I made that the OoT speedrunners use, or at least just that page. ↩

  2. I could automate this step by having a post-receive hook in the server that runs zola build when pushed to, but it's fine like this. ↩