Learning by self hosting crm and automation

It’s no longer free to do server stuff. It’s like, very cheap at $5 or $10 a month on most platforms, but nowadays you’ll have to add in a credit card and be at risk of a random DDOS $100k bill.

Obviously that’s worse case, will not happen to anybody really scenario, but still, given my lack of job, and experience self hosting, this feels like a good opportunity to learn.

I’ve got a spare mac from a few years ago that I’ll be attempting all this on initially. My plan is to get SuiteCRM (open source CRM) and N8N (open source automation) to try and automatically find leads for IT services that i’d like to provide.

notes as I’m doing stuff

installing stuff takes longer than I’d expect

Installing apache on this clean mac took like 20 min! I thought it was frozen a few times (OpenSSL took almost 11 min), but the text at the top of the terminal kept ripping.

it also has random problems

wtf I’m getting this No available formula with the name “formula.jws.json” when trying to install mysql with homebrew. I’ve also been getting “outdated xcode” warnings the entire time, so maybe that’s the cause? I’ll update the OS to the latest version and then update xcode to the latest version, to see if that fixes things.

OS IS TOO OLD!

So apple and homebrew only support the 3 most recent OS, and guess who just released mac OS 15 :/ I can only get 12 on my 2015. Looks like this’ll be a good opportunity to learn docker! Wee!

Docker is sick as hell

Install was smoooooth, n8n, mysql, and suitecrm are all up and running well. I can access it from a separate machine, and I also got SSH up and running!

NOW WHAT

So, I got the basic shit up and running, now I’d like to figure out how automations in n8n work. That’s for another day though. TIME TO GO GET SOUP AT THE FARMERS MARKET!

Also I got married! Yay!