I’m a huge supporter of Yunohost as a self-hosting system for newbies and have been using it for years. I have grown in my knowledge of linux, and self-hosting. I have gotten really interested in containerization. I have been looking for a way to run my server with docker.

I want to have my operating system separated from apps and data. I have this sort of separation on my laptops by running Silverblue, but I don’t have it on my servers.

Someone on Mastodon suggested I look into Runtipi.io. After playing with it for a few days, this looks like it could be my replacement for Yunohost.

Features

• Two-factor authentication
• App store with docker apps
• Web UI to install apps
• Traefik built in reverse proxy
• Web UI to make apps public (’expose’ apps)

Web UI

• Dashboard: The dashboard shows 3 live tiles: Disk Space, CPU Load, and Memory Used. The Memory Used tile seems to be broken for me. I’m using 700MB of RAM according to htop but it says I’m using 100% of my memory (1 GB).
• Look and Feel: clean, modern, uncluttered. This won’t overwhelm a newbie. I think if you want some of the advanced features you need to hit the command line and edit JSON files. This is something that is perfectly fine to hide from most users!
• My Apps: Shows you the installed apps. Each app tile even has a blinking green indicator to tell you it is ‘up’ and functioning.
• App-Store: before installing an app, you can look at the Base Info which tells you the version it is, the port it will be running at and what architectures it supports. In the Description it list very important information like the folder information. It shows you where the files are stores on the root system, and in the container.
• Settings: Very minimal. It’s just the essentials. You can set the DNS, domain name, internal IP, and setup 2FA.

Folder Structure

This folder structure is very organized. It looks like by default it will keep app-data in the app-data folder. I like it! It looks like it is easy to backup the system.

$ tree -L 3
── runtipi
    ├── VERSION
    ├── app-data
    │   └── calibre-web
    ├── apps
    │   └── calibre-web
    ├── data
    │   ├── postgres
    │   └── redis
    ├── docker-compose.yml
    ├── logs
    │   ├── app.log
    │   ├── app.log.history
    │   ├── error.log
    │   └── error.log.history
    ├── media
    │   ├── data
    │   ├── downloads
    │   ├── torrents
    │   └── usenet
    ├── repos
    │   └── 29ca930bfdaffa1dfabf5726336380ede7066bc53297e3c0c868b27c97282903
    ├── runtipi-cli
    ├── state
    │   ├── seed
    │   ├── settings.json
    │   └── system-info.json
    ├── traefik
    │   ├── dynamic
    │   ├── shared
    │   ├── tls
    │   └── traefik.yml
    └── user-config

Ram Usage:

With htop, it is idling at 701 MB. This is definitely something you cannot run on a 1 GB RAM VPS. It is understandable why the system requirements for Runtipi are set at 4GB RAM minimum.

Features to Investigate In the Future

Storage Path: The default path is at /home/$USER/runtipi but it looks like you can separate the data path to be somewhere else. This might be useful for me to keep data on my RAID10 external drives and the rest of the Runtipi files on the main drive.

With the default location my calibre-web data is at ~/runtipi/app-data/calibre-web. I would probably want to move this to /mnt/RAID

Local Domain: In Settings it shows you the local domain it has setup as http://tipi.lan. If you install apps, they will be accessible at app-name.tipi.lan. This would be awesome to run a server over Tailscale. I can’t actually access tipi.lan in the web browser though. Maybe I need to setup the Local SSL Certificate?

Installing Apps not In App store: Can I easily integrate apps not in the appstore into Tipi? At least get Traefik to expose them and get an SSL cert?

Conclusion

This looks like a great homeserver management system. It is mostly run with docker containers. It is easy to setup. It’s clean. It looks great.

I can’t investigate things much further without getting it on a server with at least 4GB of RAM. I might move my VPS to this if I can figure out how migrate gotosocial to this.

I will keep testing this out and see how this project develops. I’m very excited about this!