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@ the microgreens police
2025-05-13 21:11:39I've been recently rethinking my digital footprint and going through something of a digital bath. I came to the realization that I have a lot of data floating around in various cloud services. In my defense, back in the dinosaur age, it was pretty much the only way to sync data between multiple devices without too much hassle. We all accepted the fact that our data was the price for convenience and we went on living our lives, hoping that the corporations we entrusted our data with wouldn't get too evil. How naive.
Luckily, those days are far in the past and we now have somewhat reasonable self-hosting options. To make success more likely, I decided to focus on just one tiny bit of my cloud presence: notes. It's not that I am overly organized, but my brain just works better when I jot things down, so I take a lot of notes. More precisely, a lot of low-importance notes. Think about 20 different stale to-do lists, random measurements, flight numbers, book titles, recipes... you get the idea.
I've been using Google Keep forever but, like I said, I realized that the price — all my data — might be too steep for what I actually need from a note-taking app:
- I need a simple interface supporting multiple notes and markdown
- I need my notes to be synced between my devices, but it definitely does not have to be every second.
- I need my notes to be backed up, but it definitely does not have to be real-time. And even if I lose all my notes, it won't actually be the end of the world.
I set out to explore the current options and I came across the StartOS & Nextcloud solution, which can be self-hosted on a low-power device such as a Raspberry Pi. I have been playing with the setup for a while now and I decided to share my experience.
Before we move on, a few disclaimers:
- I am not affiliated with StartOS or with Nextcloud at all. I came across these products randomly, I like them, and I just decided to share my experience.
- This post is by no means any official guide and I refuse to take any responsibility for anyone losing their data. Be reasonable, people. The official docs are pretty good — this is a mere walkthrough describing my experience.
- My daily driver is a MacBook Pro, so all the examples below are from macOS and might need to be adjusted for different machines.
- This actually turned out to be more writing than I anticipated, so I decided to make it a series of posts.
Things Needed
- Raspberry Pi 4 8GB with a reliable power source
- 64GB high-endurance micro SD card
- Ethernet cable and access to your local network router
- Laptop or another device for setting things up
- Software for flashing the SD card with the OS
Getting Your Hands Dirty
Alright, here we go!
The centerpiece of the whole setup will be your Raspberry Pi running in your local network. Let's start with a few remarks about that:
- As of writing this, the latest Pi model is the 5, but — and this is important — at this moment StartOS 3.5 cannot run on anything newer than Pi 4. I totally didn't do my homework and ended up buying the 5 without checking, and then spent an hour trying to figure out why it wouldn't boot. In the end, I had to buy the 4 and now have a spare Pi lying around. Oh well, a spare Raspberry always comes in handy.
- Get a good quality power source for your Pi. They're known to be quite finicky if not fed properly, and way too many hours of troubleshooting have been wasted due to a lousy power source.
- We've all been guilty of just plugging a Raspberry Pi in and tossing the bare circuit board on a shelf, letting it do its thing. This one is to be trusted with your data, so you might as well give it a nice protective shell. I got this one here and printed it in transparent PETG. It's sturdy and it looks great. And it took a mere hour to print.
Okay, now that we have the Raspberry Pi housekeeping out of the way, let's set it up.
Installing StartOS
First, head to the StartOS GitHub repo and download the latest build for Raspberry Pi. As of writing this, it was
v0.3.5.1. Once you have the file, you should verify the checksum to make sure it hasn't been tampered with. You can do it by runningopenssl dgst -sha256 <downloaded_file_name>I usually just copy the output and do
cmd+fon the GitHub page and make sure that it finds the checksum by the build I downloaded.Once you confirm that you have the legit release, it's time to flash the micro SD card 🌶️🌶️. I use Raspberry Pi Imager, but there are plenty of alternatives too. You can get this one using Homebrew:
brew install --cask raspberry-pi-imager open -a "Raspberry Pi Imager"It should be pretty straightforward: you select your RPi model, the StartOS image you downloaded (it will be under the Custom OS option), and the micro SD card that should be plugged into your laptop. Double-check you selected the correct micro SD card because the process will erase any data on the selected device. Raspberry Pi Imager will ask you if you want to customize the OS settings before flashing. You should say no to that since StartOS has its own setup later on. Once everything is set up, hit
Nextand you should get something like this:
The process should take about 5 minutes and eventually you should get a confirmation like this:
Success! Now eject your micro SD card and it's time to boot up the Pi. Insert the micro SD card, plug in the Ethernet cable and plug the other end directly into your main router. Finally, plug in the Pi power source.The Pi should boot up. Look for the status LED to be steady red and also check that the LEDs by the Ethernet port are flashing yellow. If you can't confirm either of those, talk to your friendly neighborhood GPT; usually, the different states of the status LEDs have some meaning that should help you troubleshoot.
Once the Pi is booted up, the rest of the setup should be done mostly via the browser. Navigate to
start.localand hopefully you should get a page like this:
If you can't reach the page, it's likely because either your Pi hasn't managed to connect to your network or it hasn't booted up at all. To confirm the Pi is in your local network and that your device can see it, you can run:ipconfig getifaddr en0 # Find your local IP nmap -sn 192.168.x.0/24 # Map your local networkYou should see something like:
If you seestart.lanin your local network, you should be able to connect onstart.local. Try a different browser or rebooting your device. If you don't see it at all, or you still can't connect, there's something more serious going on and you're up for a fun troubleshooting time. Good luck.
Assuming you managed to connect to your Pi with StartOS, let's hit the
Start Freshoption to set up the server from scratch. First, you should be prompted to choose the storage device where the OS will be stored. Since your Pi only has one micro SD card slot, you should only see one device. Once you pick the only option, you'll get a warning that everything on that storage will be erased and replaced by StartOS itself. That's exactly what we want, so let's do it.
After selecting the storage device, you should get a password prompt. Come up with a decent password or use your trusty password manager to generate one — remember... reusing passwords is a sin! And don't worry, if you forget the password, you can always start from scratch. It should only take a couple of minutes and practice makes perfect. Moving on. Once the password is sorted, you should see StartOS initializing:
This should take about 3 minutes and eventually you should get a success page like this:
We're hitting the final stretch so bear with me. There are only two more things left to do. First, you should download the access info for your new server. Your browser might warn you about an insecure download but that's expected since you haven't set up the certificate yet. The download should be an HTML page with instructions for how to connect to your server from your local network and also remotely. This is important since you won't be able to access the server onstart.localanymore. The page should look like this:
Fingers crossed you get a funky name you like. I recommend storing this whole HTML file in your password manager together with your password from the previous step.The second bit is setting up and trusting your Root CA. It's so that your devices can securely communicate with your server. It's pretty straightforward. You can either hit the blue button on this page or go back to the success page and do it from there:
Either way, you should get a download of a<name-of-your-server>.crtfile. Again, I recommend storing the certificate in your password manager, but you can also always download it from the server itself once it's up and running.Detailed instructions can be found here, but basically all you need to do is the following:
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Double-click the
.crtfile and add it to the keychain. -
Hit
Command+Spacebarand type inKeychain Access, open it and you should see your certificate in the list. It's just not trusted yet.
- Right-click your certificate, select
Get Infoand expand theTrustoption. StartOS only needs the first and last option so go ahead and enable those.
- Close the trust setting and you should see the certificate being trusted now.
- Close Keychain Access and go back to your browser. Hit the refresh button and you should get a confirmation saying that your certificate is now trusted. Good job, almost there!
Now that your certificate is all set up on this device, proceed by hitting the blue
Go To Loginbutton and fill in your password from earlier. Aaand that's it. You should see the landing page of your new server like this:
From now on you should be able to access the server from this device by typing your server's address in the browser.
If you got all the way here, congrats! Your server is now set up and you're one step closer to taking control of your data.
Since this was actually more typing than I initially anticipated, I am going to take a short break here but stay tuned for vol 2 where I walk you through setting up
Nextcloud Notes.