sovereign.md 2.5KB
title: Ansible Server Setup description: My changes to the ‘Sovereign’ project parent: projects comments: true flattr: true git: https://git.xythobuz.de/thomas/sovereign github: https://github.com/xythobuz/sovereign date: 2019-01-04
update: 2022-05-22
I first started hosting my own web and mail server in April 2013, with a Debian 6 VPS at Hetzner, with manually configured Apache, Dovecot, Postfix and some other stuff. I followed random tutorials on the web, mostly not understanding what I’m actually doing and learning as I went along. But over time this got problematic. I dist-upgraded to Debian 7, probably in 2014, breaking a bunch of stuff in the process, but was somehow able to still cobble together a working system. As this was going on over the following years, I grew more scared of touching anything in the system, in fear of breaking my mail setup and impacting daily-life.
So when Hetzner announced in 2018 that they will shut-off the VPS product line I was on in April 2019, I had a dead-line for fixing this mess. At the same time, of course I continued my progression as a programmer and computer user, which put me in a much better position to take better care of my setup this time around. By coincidence, I read about the Sovereign project on that orange page. I decided to fork this, take the pieces that I need, remove stuff that is not useful for my usecases and add other software to it.
The result can be found on Gitea or on GitHub. Please take a look at the README.md in the repo. It lists all the included software and where I tested it.
I still host my stuff with Hetzner, now in their Cloud product line. Currently I run one instance for the page you’re looking at now, one instance for a Wiki and Jitsi for a group of friends and one instance as-needed for testing changes to the scripts.
I also use sovereign to configure some things in my home network. This is a Linux VM running on my TrueNAS, which runs my IoT setup for my appliances, like MQTT, Grafana and Node-RED.