I’ve spent the last several days setting up some self-hosted, public-facing apps with a Start9 server and StartTunnel.

Making locally hosted apps public has a major downside, which is your home IP address will be exposed. You can solve this by renting a VPS and installing StartTunnel, which will route requests to your local server; only the IP address of the VPS will be exposed. The basic architecture is:

web request -> DNS -> rented VPS -> StartTunnel -> local Start9 server

It took some figuring out, but I have the following apps up and running:

Here is what the Interfaces configuration looks like for Start9 Pages

Start9 Pages Interfaces Config

Most of this is handled by StartTunnel, but if you want to use a custom domain name, you need to add it in the StartTunnel Interfaces config, and add a DNS A record pointing to your VPS IP address.

My future plans include putting a CDN in front of the website and hosting site images with my local Nextcloud instance.

I made a deploy script which deploys the site to Nextcloud when I update the main branch. This uses the Forgejo Runner service.

This is all very interesting to me. I hope people can see the power and possibilities, as well as downsides, that come with self-hosting. And if you’re a developer or techie who wants to contribute to the website, it’s open source and accepting PR’s. It would be great one day to have some how-to guides to help communities become independent digitally.

Here’s a video walkthrough of my setup