Ad hoc long weekend

Last week, I got Thursday and Friday off from work. And such a 4 day long weekend out of the blue was a pleasant change.

I spent most of the time on self-hosting projects and, somewhat surprisingly, I accomplished a few different things.

I wanted to setup an Outline instance for the wife. I’ve seen complaints from a few Reddit posts that that can be hard and I had a similar experience. However, I was able to get that working by the end. Some hurdles that I had to clear:
1. Outline doesn’t support any native authentication. So, I had to setup OIDC via Authelia.
2. Since this was on a new domain, I had to make Authelia work on that. However, Authelia’s support for multiple domains is limited. So, while I was able to reuse the same instance (so, same credentials as earlier), I had to point a new Authelia subdomain to the existing Authelia instance.
As for certificate provisioning (through Let’s Encrypt), I learnt about DNS delegation and tried out the acme-dns project.
1. I first tried self-hosting the service on a Hetzner box but I quickly realized that it’d take up port 53 on that instance and I’ll have trouble reusing that for other DNS stuff in future. So, I gave up.
2. I was able to reuse their hosted service but, since they recommend you self-host, I was worried that the service may go away sometime in future. Plus, the project hadn’t gotten any code updates in the last 2 years or so, and that was another concern with it.
3. I then delegated the ACME subdomain from Cloudflare to deSEC but the latter is so finicky that ACME just didn’t work.
Eventually, I just used Cloudflare for my wife’s domain. Plus, while I was at it, I did the following 2, without any downtime:
1. I migrated DNS for my existing 2 domains from deSEC to Cloudflare.
2. I changed registrar for 1 from Namecheap to Cloudflare.
I setup a NixOS server on Hetzner through the nixos-anywhere project. I enjoyed that a lot - and it mostly just worked.