What problems are you struggling with specifically?

You basically just pick a system, for example Forgejo - that’s comparable to a self-hosted github. Which also comes with github-like actions for CI/CD/Building

I can deploy these by hand sure, but is that the only way ?

Let's assume forgejo and woodpecker.

I'd need to spin up each service + the db (postgres probably) for each.

Given i'd not have an SCM system or build pipelines until after they were deployed, am i just doing it by hand and hoping for the best or working with something like ansible, saving the scripts to a folder somewhere and manually running them myself?

How about future maintenance or reproducibility?

I'm fully capable of doing it by hand and not against it, just wasn't sure if there was a commonly used bootstrapping mechanism i wasn't aware of.