TLDR: want to get rid of casaos from my home server and learn everything on my own from the beginning, am I crazy for wanting to wipe everything and reinstall the entire system?
Hi all! A few weeks ago I got a mini-pc (Beelink S12pro), a secondary internal sata ssd (thanks to those who helped me with the choice), and I slowly set up my server with quite a few services (the *arrs, jellyfin, immich, navidrome, gotify, uptime-kuma etc.) using casaos as overlay for everything (with Debian 12 as base and tailscale to access it outside my home). I like casaos interface, and it really helped me a lot in smoothing the process of approaching docker and managing a personal server.
However, I am starting to feel a bit restricted by casaos: almost immediately I was bypassing the 1-button install and customize the container to my liking, also if I need to change something deeper I always need to check if casaos has its own way of handling things. Plus, I don’t really like the frequent connections to the app store (and I couldn’t figure out how to change the interval), or the fact that everything casaos does is done as root, which also forced me to run some containers as root user. My server isn’t exposed to the internet so I can be less worried, but I would like to know more about permissions and stuff without being forced to just run everything as root.
Removing casaos is apparently quite easy with an uninstall script, you can also keep your containers intact, however it will leave behind a lot of the dependencies installed and modification made through the install script, apparently.
I don’t think these modifications will not be useful to me, but I would like to have a system when I know what I did, what is opened/installed/activated and what is not, and by just uninstalling casaos I will not have that. Note that I am also not against UIs, I think I will install dockge for easier managment of containers, but I would like the process to be learn->setup->use ui, and not the other way around.
Am I crazy for thinking about reinstalling the entire system and start from scratch? I have backups of everything: container data folders, compose files, various media. TBH, in one week of use there are not many things that are absolutely vital, moreover, most of the media are in the secondary drive which will be left untouched. Worst case scenario, I can also avoid restoring backups (except for the arrs which were the more time-consuming to set up).
In my mind these are the pros and cons
Pros: install stuff as needed and learn what does what, without having a script automagically doing that for me, probably gaining a deeper dive into docker/compose. No overlay, no mandatory root things, possibly less maintenance?
Cons: having to set things up again (system users, ssh access, tailscale, automount usb drives, mount points for the sata drive), possibly some container stuff will not just work by re-importing from a backup?
Does the selfhosted community have some advices or opinion on this? Maybe there are also easier ways I am missing, being kind of new to all this. Thanks in advance for any answer!
The nice thing about docker is all you need to do is backup your compose file, .env file, and mapped volumes, and you can easily restore on any other system. I don’t know much about CasaOS, but presumably you have the ability to stop your containers and access the filesystem to copy their config and mapped volumes elsewhere? If so this should be pretty easy. You might have some networking stuff to work out, but I suspect the rest should go smoothly and IMO would be a good move.
When self-hosting, the more you know about how things actually work, the easier it is to fix when something is acting up, and the easier it is to make known good backups and restore them.
Thank you for the answer :)
Yes absolutely, they provide a nice filebrowser which can also be mounted as a samba share (which they setup during install), in case one doesn’t want to use the terminal for everything.
As far as networking, from what I could see the only real change casaos was doing was mapping its dashboard to port 80, but not much more. Is there anything more I should be aware in general?
Exactly, I feel I am at the point where I got my hands dirty enough that I can dive deeper into knowing things, not necessarily immediately, but step-by-step.
It depends on how you have things set up. If you’re just doing normal docker compose networking with port forwards then there shouldn’t be much to change, but if you’re doing anything more advanced like macvlan then you might have to set up taps on the host to be able to communicate with the container (not sure if CasaOS handles that automatically).