this post was submitted on 02 May 2025
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I recently discovered yunohost, a French project for easy selfhosting. Does anyone have experience with that?

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[–] cichy1173@szmer.info 1 points 11 hours ago

Yunohost has been recommended to me a couple of years ago and this is a software that brought me into #selfhosting.

Thanks to Yunohost's application catalog, I got familiar with quite a few interesting applications, learnt about their capabilities, and I still use many of them today, such as Hedgedoc and Wallabag. In addition, Yunohost makes it easy to manage domains or reverse proxies. I currently work as SysOps/SysAdmin/DevOps and when I choose to deploy an application, I opt for something I have more control over, but without yunohost I would never have stepped into this career path. I continue to use yunohost on my main server, which is a bastion of stability for me, but I test new apps and host them on a separate server. In Yunohost, on the other hand, I install the Redirect application to conveniently have access to them outside my network.

[–] philpo@feddit.org 8 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

Yunohost is okayish. Some apps sadly are badly maintained and therefore upgraded with more delay than I considered acceptable (but that has improved afaik)and integration into a single "look and feel" is a bit lacking. Nevertheless it's solid in the end.

If you are willing to pay something Cloudron may be an alternative for you as well - very well maintained product, good support team and rock solid from my experience - and it's a non-US/non-China company. (German to be exact) But it costs money for more than 2 applications. I nevertheless went with them - I don't self host as a hobby, I self-host because I want shit to work. Between job and family I have no time to fiddle around with things and keep everything updated on a short notice. I have project where I can do that, but they are not something my family or myself depend on. (And they integrate nicely with Cloudron as you can add "custom" Apps/use it as a proxy and OpenID Provider)

[–] WhiteHotaru@feddit.org 1 points 8 hours ago (1 children)

Nice! I live in Germany and your situation looks similar to mine. I started with Linux 20 years ago and bought a Synology about a year ago. I have my most essential services (backup, photos, Media server and paperless) running on that machine in my local network. I started with a small VPS and a blog after this, to see if I could handle managing a server. It went well.

We have a small cabin we share with others and I wanted to set up some basic services like a calendar. Went across a post about yunohost and gave it a try.

[–] philpo@feddit.org 2 points 8 hours ago

Have a look at Cloudron as well,then. It's free for 2 Apps and Johannes (the founder) is a fairly nice guy from Bavaria.

Anyway,yeah. I have a different post here what I self host (which doesn't even include everything...) so it's a slippery slope.

[–] MajesticElevator@lemmy.zip 3 points 1 day ago

I was searching for something like this! Seems really promising, I’ll check it, thanks!

[–] poloqualle@feddit.org 3 points 1 day ago

I really like it. Yes, you have way more control by using docker/nixos/etc of course, but for things like seafile or nextcloud, yunohost does the good ol' 80% job with 20% of the effort and time, at least for me.

[–] electric_nan@lemmy.ml 4 points 1 day ago

Been using it for 10+ years. Love it.

[–] 0_o7@lemmy.dbzer0.com 12 points 2 days ago

yunotryityourself?

[–] ABetterTomorrow@lemm.ee 1 points 1 day ago

Never heard of it till now, now I’m going to try it out!

[–] toastmeister@lemmy.ca 3 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Umbrel, Cosmos Cloud, Caprover, Yacht, Dokku, there's a billion of these things.

[–] cichy1173@szmer.info 1 points 11 hours ago (1 children)

Not exactly. Yunohost offers solution to host services openly to the internet thanks to simplified configuration of domains (and it even offers free domains) and reverse proxy. Also it has built in email server (not client, but the server). Apps are packaged in its own format and with unique configuration, it is not just some wrapper for Docker Conpose

[–] toastmeister@lemmy.ca 1 points 10 hours ago

Oh thats pretty neat. I know Cosmos Cloud had some interesting functionality similar to that, with Oauth support for everything. Though I've not tried it.

[–] Jerry@feddit.online 46 points 2 days ago

Elena Rossini, well known for her help in growing the Fediverse, raves about Yunohost, https://news.elenarossini.com/my-year-of-fediverse-explorations/. You should be fine using it.

@_elena@mastodon.social

[–] gkaklas@lemmy.zip 35 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

Yes, it's pretty good! I'm a DevOps engineer, and have experience with Ansible, Docker, etc, but I just couldn't find time to deploy services the best way that I wanted™ for my personal server

So, even though it e.g. doesn’t even use Docker, yunohost really helped me start using the many services I wanted/needed, which otherwise might take e.g. a few hours to a couple of days for each of them to research and configure

So I have one "production" yunohost server, one "testing" yunohost server to test services that I don't know if I'll use yet (and I wouldn't want them to interfere with production e.g. by using too many resources)

and one server without yunohost for mailu, Docker, traefik, etc, which I can use to deploy services the correct way™ as I figure out the services that I really use and find the time to migrate them one-by-one

Even when using yunohost, there are so many things to do after deploying a service (e.g. DNS, configure the server and client software), so it has been really useful to save time when deploying and configuring.

I think it gets you ~80% there, makes self-hosting accessible to everyone, and helps democratize the Internet a bit 💚 It's more important to have many people setting up e.g. Immich or Nextcloud for their family photos, than only a few Linux people being able to learn how to do it perfectly (Docker/kubernetes high availability, reverse proxies, etc) and have everyone else to need to resort to using centralized services

[–] WhiteHotaru@feddit.org 2 points 8 hours ago

I think time efficiency and stability are the two traits I am looking for. Looks like yunohost can offer those.

[–] RagingHungryPanda@lemm.ee 15 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Elena Rossini (@_elena@mastodon.social) is a journalist who's gotten into the fediverse and self hosting with Yuno Host. She's documented it on her blog. It's worked out really well for her.

[–] rirus@feddit.org 17 points 2 days ago

Des, it has, what most others lack: Single Sign In and many Apps.

[–] Marty_TF@lemmy.zip 17 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

not myself, but my stepdad tried it with 2 decades of IT and linux sysadmin experience.

basically, it is great if you want to host like 2 or 3 standalone services on a pi to get into understanding how the basics of selfhosting work, but for homelabs and deep customization, you're better off with docker compose on debian/ubuntu server.

[–] Fisch@discuss.tchncs.de 12 points 2 days ago (1 children)

I've used it when I started out and it's good, I can recommend it if you just want something where you can hit install and it works. I just use docker containers now though because I have more experience and it allows to set everything up exactly how I want.

[–] whysofurious@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 points 2 days ago

Same process here, started with yunojost and now using docker directly. Still Yunohost got me into self-hosting when I didn't know anything about it, definitely recommended for starting out.

[–] koala@programming.dev 8 points 2 days ago

I did some testing with it, because I believe more people should be able to self-host.

I like how it is implemented. It has good support for email. Many apps support SSO.

The critical part to me is how up-to-date applications are. I started a small project to automate version tracking, check out:

https://alexpdp7.github.io/selfhostwatch/app/nextcloud.html

; so for example, the YunoHost Nextcloud app does not lag much behind upstream. My intention with this is to let people see that they have been updating Nextcloud dilligently for two years; they might pull the plug tomorrow, but it's a good track record.

(I'd like to add scrapers to other projects similar to YunoHost. My ultimate goal would be to be able to choose a list of apps you'd like to self-host, and see which projects like YunoHost carry the applications you want, and compare how they track updates.)

[–] napkin2020@sh.itjust.works 1 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

Big part of me loving selfhosting stuff is that I get to learn things a lot. I think it's pretty amazing that these sort of projects exist but I'll always use good ol' $BASIC_SERVER_OS.

[–] Ugurcan@lemmy.world 6 points 2 days ago

Used for years, then moved into docker containers.

It’s pretty rad, especially as a domain controller.

[–] Allero@lemmy.today 5 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Nice as a starting point, but not enough features to make it worth it for advanced setups.

[–] WhiteHotaru@feddit.org 1 points 7 hours ago (1 children)
[–] Allero@lemmy.today 1 points 1 hour ago

Ability to properly work with apps outside the officially recommended list, to customize Docker containers etc.

At least from what I can recall from 1-1,5 years ago that I used it.

[–] Jerry@feddit.online 6 points 2 days ago
[–] mesamunefire@piefed.social 4 points 2 days ago

Use it everyday. I self host a number of fedi services. It's a great os.

Most of the apps are great, but there are a couple that are no longer maintained.

[–] Samsy@lemmy.ml 5 points 2 days ago (2 children)

Looks good. But I got burnt with CasaOS. Only App organizer I still use is dockge.

[–] theorangeninja@sopuli.xyz 5 points 2 days ago

+1 for dockge. But that's something for later. Yunohost is a great way to get a feeling for selfhosting.

[–] PoisonedPrisonPanda@discuss.tchncs.de 1 points 2 days ago (1 children)

what do you meant with burnt? i thought its even easier than yunohost?

[–] Samsy@lemmy.ml 1 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Burnt my fingers. It's not enough freedom for changing compose settings. But that's just my two cents.

thats true. when I tried it I even found it more difficult because of the limite. you must trust the scripts and if something does not work its a lot more complicated than setting it up by yourself.

[–] specialseaweed@sh.itjust.works 3 points 2 days ago (1 children)

I had the same experience as many here. Great place to start out and if you don't need or want more control then it's perfect. I ended up on unraid and mostly use docker for apps.

[–] Banthex@feddit.org 2 points 1 day ago

For my vps i use yunohost and for selfhosting from Synology to unraid now. Yunohost is very time saving with subdomain and security Management.

[–] HelloRoot@lemy.lol 1 points 2 days ago

I run Dokploy which is like yunohost but a little bit more advanced.