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I would like to have a mechanism to set up a server automagically…
(social.graves.cl)
A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.
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I completely agree. But I'm working from the assumption that if OP actually needs the ability to automatically provisions platforms, they're probably working at a larger scale than the typical small self-hosted home server. And I like to give options.
IMO, the only tools here that most self hosters need are Docker, and maybe Ansible, though even that is a stretch because in most cases you're just going to have one server running all your containers and that's it.
It's the whole "Cattle vs Pets" question. When you're a typical self hoster, you're probably better off just treating every server as a pet. But if you're using self hosting as a way of building job skills (which is exactly how I broke into IT) then you absolutely want to start learning how to wrangle cattle.