I’ve been slowly moving along in this self-hosting journey and now have a number of services that I regularly use and depend on. Of course I’m backing things up, but I also still worry about screwing up my server and having to rollback/rebuild/fix whatever got messed up.
I’m just curious, for those of you with home labs, do you use a testing environment of some kind or do you just push whatever your working on straight to "production
- edit: grammar
For services only I depend on, I have production-only. Since I can only inflict damage on myself, and can often work around problems.
For the XMPP server my friends and family also depend on, I have a dedicated nonprod VPS. My services are driven by ansible playbooks, so I’ll tweak the playbook with whatever change I want to make works in nonprod, before running the same playbook against prod.
Whenever there’s a new Debian Stable release, I’ll rebuild the servers completely, to try and prevent “drift” between the nonprod and prod versions (not that I change things often enough for this to become a big problem). This is also the big test of my backups, which so far haven’t been needed in a “real” emergency 🤞