Disclaimer this is a long guide, you might want to drink coffee first

Used proxmox add additional notes into installing on other physical devices / vm

Downloading Ubuntu

We are not savages so we are gonna use the LTS version, feel free to use other versions as of the date of this writing the latest is Ubuntu Server 22.04.2 LTS

Go to this page

Click on the download button an ISO file will be downloaded for you.

Things to do when download is completed

• Link will be added here in the future after i write a specific guide using the following
• Bootable Flashdrive for physical installation
• VM using VMWare or VirtualBox
• Promox Instance

Installing Ubuntu Server

1. Start the machine
2. Boot into the installation medium
3. Detailed steps and screens are provided below

First Screen

Select `*Try or Install Ubuntu Server` press `enter`

Ubuntu Live Boot

Wait for the live boot to finish

Select Language

Select desired language, this is different from setting your locale

Installer Update

The installer will update itself, feel free to skip this part use the arrow keys to navigate to Continue without updating and press enter

Selecting Keyboard Layout

Keyboard layout most of the keyboard that are in PH is English(US/QWERTY)

Ubuntu Selection

Select Ubuntu Server

Network Connection

As of this example my network is under 192.168.110.0/24 subnet, thats why my dhcp address in the screen is 192.168.110.85/24 yours might be 192.168.1.x/24 the most common subnets for home routers, if you dont know what you are doing skip the next part and just click done on this part, the next part is about manually asigning and ipv4 address.

Static IP Assignment

1. Navigate to the ether port using arrow keys press enter then go to edit

2. A new popup below will show you what IPv4 Method you want to use press enter, you are in this section so select Manual

3. A new popup with the following labels Subnet , Address, Gateway, Name servers, Search domains

• Subnet e.g 192.168.1.0/24 if you dont understand it click here
• Address e.g 192.168.1.137 you can replace 137, you dont know what it is? click here
• Gateway e.g 192.168.1.1 your router address, for more info click here
• Name servers e.g 8.8.8.8 is google’s public dns 1.1.1.1 is cloudflare enter multitple with comma 8.8.8.8,8.8.8.4 or 1.1.1.1,1.1.1.4

For reference here is what i entered while doing this guide

Network Setup Done

Setup Proxy

This is not in the scope of this guide so click here

Setup Mirror

Mirror is where we download packages from a certain server when we do something like apt install neovim if you are not using any vpn, the installer will detect and give us ph server as default

Storage

I will not dive deep into this but this is basically where you set your storage size and partition depending on what machine you are doing this from it will show the hardisk in your system in this demo i allocated 32gb of storage space and i will use it all, in your case if you are on a physical machine partition it well or use the entire ssd there is also an encryption option its up to you wether you want the data of this system encrypted or not press enter

Finish storage setup

If you are fine with the default settings ubuntu installer did Confirm and Continue this will format your storage medium.

Fill up Profile

Ubuntu Pro

Well if you can afford why not?

Open SSH

Install it as we are gonna use OpenSSH server to connect and do more with our server

Featured Snaps

In this screen we wont install anything as we will dockerize services like nextcloud

Install Complete

Now the wait begins as get a cup of coffee, depending on how old your installer is the update will take long, Reboot after it is done!

Your first boot

First Boot

The machine is now ready to be hacked!

Connecting to our server

SSH Login

Open a terminal in your workstation and connect through ssh

depending on what username and ipaddress of your server is assuming that you are on the same network you can use this command to connect to the server ssh username@ipv4address

a password will be asked

ssh [email protected]

Updating our server

First update

on your terminal update your server with the following commands these are 2 commands for just checking updates use sudo apt update these updates and references the list of packages you have installed if a new version is released, sudo apt upgrade upgrade all the packages

sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade

After entering the command you will be prompted with Y/n if you want to upgrade enter Y and enter

Depending on how heavy the update is and whether it affects services a screen will appear in your terminal like the one below

Installing Docker and Portainer

open your terminal copy paste the entire snippet and run it

sudo apt-get install ca-certificates curl gnupg

sudo install -m 0755 -d /etc/apt/keyrings
curl -fsSL https://download.docker.com/linux/ubuntu/gpg | sudo gpg --dearmor -o /etc/apt/keyrings/docker.gpg
sudo chmod a+r /etc/apt/keyrings/docker.gpg

echo \
 "deb [arch="$(dpkg --print-architecture)" signed-by=/etc/apt/keyrings/docker.gpg] https://download.docker.com/linux/ubuntu \
 "$(. /etc/os-release && echo "$VERSION_CODENAME")" stable" | \
 sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/docker.list > /dev/null

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install docker-ce docker-ce-cli containerd.io docker-buildx-plugin docker-compose-plugin docker-compose

Terminal Output

Checking docker installation

sudo docker ps

Additional docker commands to add you the $USER so you dont need to sudo docker commands anymore

sudo groupadd docker
sudo usermod -aG docker $USER
newgrp docker

Installing Portainer

The following command does the following for us

• downloads the latest portainer image
• sets the container to restart always on failure
• exposes port 9000 for http where we can access our portainer web page later at 192.168.110.133:9000
• adds volumes for its dependencies
• check the docs if you want to deploy it on https port on 9443

sudo docker run -d -p 8000:8000 -p 9443:9443 -p 9000:9000 --name portainer --restart=always -v /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock -v portainer_data:/data portainer/portainer-ce:latest

After succesful installation we can now access the web page in your browser go to assignedIpv4:9000 replace ipv4 to whatever your dhcp server assigned to your server or whatever you set statically

Setup your account where it needs username and password after that login and add a welcome screen appears

Click Home and you are presented with your local docker instance

Click live connect and you will be navigated to your local instance dashboard

Go to app templates and feel free to install any template you want a good example would be File Browser i havent used it myself but basically you can navigate your server files and folders in through your web browser

Installing Postgres and PgAdmin4

Before proceeding we can check that on our docker ps command portainer exists and is running well

docker ps

No we can start installing PostgresSQL and PgAdmin4 there are 2 ways we can install The first option is below

First option

1. Create a docker volume where postgres sql db file will be persisted

sudo docker volume create postgresqldata

2. Postgres Installation

• This downloads the postgres image from docker repository/registry
• Uses the volume we created earlier with /data/db location
• Exposes the 5432 port, postgres defalt port, allows us to connect to postgres through 192.168.110.133:5432 this address
• Default username is postgres we set the password to postgres feel free to replace it

sudo docker run -d -v postgresqldata:/data/db -e POSTGRES_PASSWORD=postgres --name postgres -p 5432:5432 postgres

3. Install and run docker named pgadmin, replace [email protected] and somethingsecret with your email and desired password

• This downloads the dpage/pgadmin4 image from docker repository/registry
• Exposes the 8080 port, the default port is 80, but we can use that default http port for something else
• We can access the web page through 192.168.110.8080 feel free to use other ports
• replace [email protected] and somethingsecret with your email and desired password

sudo docker run --name pgadmin -e "[email protected]" -e "PGADMIN_DEFAULT_PASSWORD=somethingsecret" -p 8080:80 -d dpage/pgadmin4

4. Connect them together

sudo docker network create --driver bridge pgnetwork
sudo docker network connect pgnetwork pgadmin
sudo docker network connect pgnetwork postgres
# check network bridge
docker network inspect pgnetwork

5. Additional optins on portainer settings we could have done it on the commands above but i want to show you how to use the portainer also

   • Navigate and login to your portainer web page e.g 192.168.110.133:9000

   • Live connect to your local instance check containers and you will see the following

     

   • if You cant see the Published Ports of the container we created you did something wrong!

   • Click on the container postgres and if you scroll down you will see Container details

   • On RESTART_POLICIES where the default is set to none change it to always

     

   • Do the same thing with pgadmin container

Second Option

Docker compose

version: '3.9'

services:
  pg:
    container_name: postgres
    image: postgres
    # automatically restarts the container - Docker daemon on restart or
    # the container itself is manually restarted
    restart: always
    volumes:
      - postgresqldata:/data/db

    environment:
      POSTGRES_USER: postgres
      POSTGRES_PASSWORD: postgres
      POSTGRES_DB: postgres
    ports:
      - '5432:5432'
    networks:
      - bridge
      - pgnetwork

  pgadmin:
    container_name: pgadmin4
    image: dpage/pgadmin4
    restart: always

    environment:
      PGADMIN_DEFAULT_EMAIL: [email protected]
      PGADMIN_DEFAULT_PASSWORD: root

    ports:
      - '8080:80'
    networks:
      - bridge
      - pgnetwork

volumes:
  postgresqldata:

networks:
  bridge:
  pgnetwork:

Create a docker-compose.yaml anywhere in your home directory for me i store my docker-compose files at composers

in the directory where you created your docker-compose.yaml enter the following commands

docker compose up

Additional runtime dependencies needed

• build-essentials and cmake
• nvm(Node Version Manager)

sudo apt install build-essentials cmake zsh
type -p curl >/dev/null || (sudo apt update && sudo apt install curl -y)
curl -fsSL https://cli.github.com/packages/githubcli-archive-keyring.gpg | sudo dd of=/usr/share/keyrings/githubcli-archive-keyring.gpg \
&& sudo chmod go+r /usr/share/keyrings/githubcli-archive-keyring.gpg \
&& echo "deb [arch=$(dpkg --print-architecture) signed-by=/usr/share/keyrings/githubcli-archive-keyring.gpg] https://cli.github.com/packages stable main" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/github-cli.list > /dev/null \
&& sudo apt update \
&& sudo apt install gh -y

sh -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ohmyzsh/ohmyzsh/master/tools/install.sh)"

curl --proto '=https' --tlsv1.2 -sSf https://sh.rustup.rs | sh

clone dotfiles
curl -o- https://raw.githubusercontent.com/nvm-sh/nvm/v0.39.3/install.sh | bash