How to set up your personal server for projects

I have often been stumped at one stage of personal software projects: sharing with others. It goes one of three ways:

1. I come up with a fun idea and make a prototype. The repo is up on github. Anyone who wants to use it will clone it, recreate the environment, and execute on their machine. Many times the work to set up the project demo is not worth the utility of the actual demo.

2. Or, I am setting up a closed-source project, but would love user feedback.

3. Or, it’s a project for myself that I’d like to host publicly (see here how I wrote a script to get into tennis meetups).

In all of the above cases, uploading to a repository host (Github), or some static website builder (vercel, cloudfare, github) is insufficient. Previously, I’d exposed my home server to host projects (see here how I SSH to my desktop remotely). Server availability in that case is subject to power outages, networking restrictions, and foremost - security.

Now, I’ve taken to using virtual private servers to host some projects. This is how it works:

1. I get a Virtual Private Server (VPS) (think Google Cloud free tier e2-micro instance, Digital Ocean droplet etc.)
2. I set up a dynamic DNS service to the server is accessible via a domain name.
3. I set up a Caddy server reverse proxy, which comes with built-in TLS security.
4. I deploy my projects as usual on localhost, and tell Caddy to proxy them. This works with docker containers, streamlit apps, simple django/flask apps, and static pages.

If you want to follow along, you should know how to get a VPS and log into it.

graph TD;

U[User]
C[Caddy Server]
D[Docker Container]
F[Flask App]
S[Streamlit App]
P[Static Page]

U --> C
C --> D
C --> F
C --> S
C --> P

Dynamic DNS

Use either of the following. Neither requires a payment.

NoIP

Use this to get a hostname which will dynamically updated with your server’s IP address. You can pay to set this up with a custom hostname.

• Use noip.com to get a dynamic dns hostname,
• Install ddns client on linux machine

cd /usr/local/src/
curl -O http://www.noip.com/client/linux/noip-duc-linux.tar.gz
tar xf noip-duc-linux.tar.gz
cd noip-2.1.9-1/
make install

• Then run the noip2 exe in the /usr/local/bin/noip2 -C to set up config. Finally run /usr/local/bin/noip2 to start updating.
• To set this up to start at boot, create a service like so.

ddclient (preferred)

Use ddclient if you have a hostname already, and want to update its DNS records. It supports dozens of dynamic DNS services

Install ddclient using sudo apt-get install ddclient (debian/ubuntu). The docs walk through setting up a configuration file which you can leave alone after the first time.

Reverse Proxy (Caddy)

Install Caddy. The docs walk through setting up a configuration file. An example configuration Caddyfile may look like this:

HOSTNAME {
    redir /app1 /app1/
    handle_path /app1/* {
        reverse_proxy localhost:8080
    }
    redir /app2 /app2/
    handle_path /app2/* {
        reverse_proxy localhost:1234
    }
    redir /app3 /app3/
    handle_path /app3/* {
        root * /path/to/my/static/site
        file_server
    }
}

This forwards all requests to HOSTNAME/app1 to whatever is running on localhost:8080, and HOSTNAME/app2 to whatever is running on localhost:1234, and HOSTNAME/app3 to a static site. See Caddy Examples for more usage patterns.

Run your projects as usual!

On the VPS, deploy your projects as you would on a local machine.

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streamlit run mystreamlitproject/app.py --server.port 1234
python -m flask --app myflaskapp run
# do nothing for the static site - that's the whole point :)