The creation of the site is complete and it is currently exposed through cloudflare. It seems to be working perfectly as I have not had any trouble with it so far. Not sure what future posts will be about but you will be updated on items of my choosing.

Creation of This Site

In this post I will talk about the creation of this website and how I fixed any troubles that I had.

Home Sever

Around two years ago, I made a home server. Anyone can make a home server as it can just be a raspberry pi or an old pc as running applications on your home server is not resource intensive.

Choosing an Operating System

When choosing an operating system for my home server I had one main thing that I needed to have. An operating system that was extremely efficient on resources, so it wouldn’t waste any resources on an UI or anything unnecessary.

This immediately pushed out Windows as an option as Windows is extremely inefficient as a server, and MacOS is limited to Apple devices or can be installed through some trickery, which I was not going to be doing (at that point). So that left me with Linux, I knew that the chosen operating system would need to be stable and not prone to breaking. I didn’t want to set up another Arch installation, and especially not for a home server so Arch Linux was off the table. That left two main Linux distros for me, Ubuntu and Debian. What pushed me over the edge for Debian is that with Debian, they offer a server only option, where it is barebones and allows you to choose what will be installed.

But then I had an idea that having access to a file server would be neat, so I threw that all out the window and downloaded the openmediavault ISO.

Installation

The installation of openmediavault was surprisingly simple. I was able to download and install it without any trouble at all. There just really isn’t much to say here, as I have also forgotten what I mostly did during this time, other than add some plugins.

Docker/Portainer

Though after some time, I realized I wanted to do more with my server. I wanted to stream media, host Minecraft servers, and bang my head into the wall from frustration. I knew that this could all be achieved through installing Docker. Docker is both a blessing and a curse. It is extremely useful for managing and using applications, and it is a curse since you have to manage applications. This is made a lot easier by the docker application called portainer.

Portainer was and is a gamechanger. With being able to manager Docker containers through a gui, and being able to easily deploy more containers through docker compose or any other way. I highly recommend it if a person is not used to only using command lines and Linux, and a person wants to get into Docker.

Time Skip to WordPress

Lets skip some time to when I installed WordPress onto my Docker server. I had already tried to port forward my server once before, but it didn’t work due to my router. But this time I was confident. Though, while exploring Cloudflare to check up on my domain (jowstin.com) I found something called Cloudflare ZeroTrust. Which allows Cloudflare to connect your domain to your server without port forward, and only with the ports that you allow.

ZeroTrust Arc

Zerotrust will show to be both a boon and a curse. But I will get to that later. After installing WordPress through a Portainer template I also installed Cloudflared. Cloudflared allows Cloudflare to use ZeroTrust on the host machine or the Docker network it is apart of. So I set up Cloudflared and WordPress into the same Docker network, and I find that Cloudflared shows that Docker is refusing connection. At this point I already know that Cloudflared works since I used it on another application to test it. So after two days of trouble shooting I use an online docker compose file instead of the one provided by Portainer, and I also installed Cloudflared onto the home server directly, instead of through Docker.

Then it finally worked.