Self Hosting DOCUMENTATION

[Music] so [Music] hello and welcome back once again today we're going to talk about self-hosted documentation everybody's got notes laying around on their desk like this and critically important information is always on the front a lot of times on the back and the point is you lose them there's got to be a better way so self-hosted documentation is important because you're going to want to document how you configure your home lab you're going to want to document your network configuration you want to document the steps you use to install applications and you want to keep notes on your how to's in order to solve particular problems that keep reoccurring examples are upgrade procedures for products like discourse wordpress rocket chat and next cloud popular note-taking applications are evernote google keep and microsoft onenote there are also self-hosted options to document your home lab so what are some self-hosted note-taking applications well they include programs like standard notes turtle trillium open note and next cloud notes i really like nexcloud a lot and it does have great note-taking features but i consider nexcloud to be more of a cloud-based workspace with multiple functions and a lot of times i like something a little bit more lean my note-taking application of choice is joplin so joplin keeps your data private on your own local machine joplin can be synced and accessed by multiple clients joplin is available for windows mac linux ios and android and joplin is up to date at the latest joplin client that i've got here is version 2.5.1 and it's only a couple of weeks old joplin is simple to use it supports graphics and it has a markdown editor there's also a joplin server joplin clients can sync to the server most commonly joplin data is synced to a file system or it's synced to one drive next cloud a web dav server dropbox or aws i used to sync my job joplin clients to web dev and later to next cloud joplin sync server was released in january of 2021 and is still marked as beta but is very stable and one of the reasons that i went off to use joplin server to sync my notes rather than use nexcloud was performance to get a lot better performance off of the specifically purposed joplin server to do my note syncing the last release of joplin server was in the last two weeks of this presentation so we're talking about some really updated products here currently maintained joplin sync server is a web interface and a database application using postgres sql database in two docker containers and joplin server works via nginx reverse proxy manager so you can sync clients from anywhere so as an example i have maybe a desktop client a client on my laptop a client on my phone and other computers and that way whenever i make changes to my notes they sync to all the clients because they sync to the server and joplin server and joplin accounts are created and maintained by you locally okay so now we're going to install the joplin client i'm going to do a sudo snap install joplin dash james dash carol and it installs the snap package now that the snap package is installed we will exit the terminal and we will type in joplin and here's what joplin looks like when you install it freshly it'll come up and it will show you that you have a notebook or you can have multiple notebooks you can have as many notebooks as you want i i by definition of just put everything in one notebook i have no organization um and then you uh you have notes underneath the notebook so here we have note one two three four so there's the first note there's the second note there's the third note and you can delete these default notes of course and then you have the ability to go off and synchronize so i could go off here and it'll tell you that you can sync to joplin cloud they have a sync service again it's public but that's why i like the self-hosted joplin server that we're going to talk about and of course dropbox and onedrive but you can go off and edit all of those things in options that's where you have the ability to set your sync server so you can go off and set your sync target we're going to be using the joplin server beta and then we're going to be we'll have a server url in here in my case if i go off and and type it i have an existing joplin server but we're going to go ahead and create one so anyway that's um pretty much what there is to the client creating new notes is fairly intuitive um i like the way the product works and of course you can see that it's got embedded graphics um the left side of the screen is uh is kind of your markdown editor and the right side of the screen is what you see gui wise and if you don't want that you can always come up here to the full screen mode and you can just see all of this down here but it's uh it's quite useful i put frequently put screenshots in here and uh and other graphics and indentations it's got an editor with all the common things you would expect to see up here anyway that's basically all there is to the client so joplin sync server has a github project and the github project has some documentation on how to install the server i ran around in circles for quite a bit trying to figure out how exactly this works and that's the beauty of this video i've done all that in advance so we have a server here it's a dedicated server instance in my particular case and the first thing that we want to do is we want to go off and install we want to go off and install docker so i'm installing docker okay now that docker's installed i'm going to add my user to the docker group and then i'm going to bring the doctor group in as an active group i can type groups and you can see that docker is now added to my scott account the next thing i'm going to do is install docker compose so i'm going to do a sudo apt install docker dash compose okay we're going to do a maker on a data folder we're going to cd into the data folder we're gonna make dirt on a postgres folder inside of it and we're gonna cd back to the main folder okay so the next step is we're going to have to create a docker compose file so we're going to do a nano docker dash compose yml and we're going to go ahead and paste in the syntax for this which i will put in the show notes so what you want to look at here is this thing has two volumes it has a database docker volume and it has an application for the joplin server volume and you want to go ahead and make sure that you set the password the same something probably more cryptic than my password but you want to have the password and the user and the uh and the database match in the upper section and in the lower environment section and then in the lower environment section we want to specify the name of our server so this says joplin.example.com in our particular case i'm going to make it sync dot scatterbyte dot com so you have to go off and define either an a record or c name record that is going to point to your server in your domain name service provider so i have predefined sync.scottabyte.com so at this point you can do a save on the file once you do a save you can say docker dash compose space up as a test we're not going to detach it yet but we're going to run it as a test to see how it pulls everything so that it works so at this point in time the server should be up and running and we're going to go ahead and do a control c to stop it and then we're going to go ahead and do a docker dash compose space up dash d to detach this program so that we can go ahead and log out in nginx proxy manager we want to define a proxy host to point to our domain name and we're going to make it http and then the address inside your network for the server that we just built and the forward port should be 22 300. we want to go we want to go over to ssl and we want to go ahead and request a new certificate and you can come back in here later and say force ssl and once you've done that then you should be able to go off and click on your sync server and it will go to wherever your address is in my case it's sync.scottabyte.com and it redirects me to a login directory and your initial password for this thing is going to be admin localhost and your password is going to be admin so we're going to log in and it will warn us that the default password should be changed so we're going to click on change it now i usually like to just put my name in here um and go ahead and put my address and my email address in here and then uh everything else is pretty good well the password so i'll go ahead and set my password up and update profile ah wants a better password all right so let's just try uh okay it seems to have like that so i can go here and log off and i would log back in with my email address and i can type in my password and it logs me in so i'm an administrator at this point so i can go off and add other sync users to this uh and i can make other settings it'll show you items that are currently synced right now we don't have any items so we could go ahead and and sync items i'm uh i'm not going to do that instead what i'm going to do is i'll go ahead and show you uh that i have a sync server set up and that i have um notes syncing to it okay so here's my joplin notes client and if i click on synchronize right now you can see it's completed because everything's already synced to it i have 62 notes currently on my notebook and it's just my notebook name is scott's techie notes and i just have all kinds of information in here for example on the joplin server i have the instructions that i use to install the joplin server and everything that i did to do it i have my nginx proxy manager documented in here what ports i used or some screen showing me all the different addresses my bit warden i have information on how i set up bit warden my rocket chat server same thing so a lot of a lot of documentation here if we go off to tools and we go to options and we go to synchronization you can see that i'm pointing to my uh joplin sync server which is actually joplin.scottabyte.com not the test one we did during the installation and then i use my email and then i have this like uh it doesn't look like it but it's like a 64 character password in here and it says the sync interval is five minutes now there is one other thing i'm going to show you and that is go under advanced settings here for whatever reason you're going to have to put a check mark in this ignore tls certificate errors and the reason for that is because right now with the development of the beta server it's flagging some kind of a tls error but if you put a check mark in there it will sync just fine and this is going to be a very important step that you need to do to make sure that your sync server works so in summary joplin notes clients are available for windows mac linux ios and android joplin server can be host self-hosted and is much faster and more reliable than other sync mechanisms and most importantly joplin notes provides a readily available open source tool to document your home lab and keep all of your data local anyway thanks so much for listening today and i hope you'll subscribe and like and we'll see you on down the road the next time [Music] [Applause] [Music] you

Channel: Scotti-BYTE Enterprise Consulting Services

Views: 118

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Id: tWNUt20yNu0

Length: 19min 10sec (1150 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 22 2021