I’m currently running grist-desktop on my Debian 12 desktop machine on my home LAN. I’m liking what I see so far.
What would I gain (or lose) if I go to a self-hosted installation of grist-core? I run apache2 on my desktop machine already with some services (e.g. DokuWiki) so I assume running grist-core wouldn’t be too difficult.
Presumably grist would be accessible from other systems on my LAN, that might be useful but it’s certainly not something I need.
Does moving to grist-code add much more than running grist as a server/client setup?
It sounds like we have very similar usage needs with Grist. It might be useful to have it accessible from other systems, but not necessarily something I need.
I have justified trying to self-host Grist because I’ve been setting up a frequency repository for our ham radio group in Grist and would like to make it available on my website.
Unless you’re already really familiar with docker and have an actual use case for self-hosting, I would just stick with the desktop version. I was not familiar at all with docker or reverse proxies and have spent months tinkering with getting everything set up in a way that will be reliable and work long-term with minimal maintenance other than updates and such. That includes self-hosting nextcloud and moving all of our security cameras over to frigate, making everything secure and available through my website, so more than just trying to get Grist running.
Grist was probably the hardest to get sorted out, besides nextcloud. The documentation for setting up self-hosted Grist is minimal. The Grist developers seem to keep moving along at a pretty quick pace and the documentation is lagging behind, along with a lot of information here in the forums that is way outdated, so I spent a lot of time filtering for what was still applicable today. To be fair to the Grist developers, supporting the self-hosted version is a loss for them because they get nothing from it, unless we choose to make a donation. They understandably would like us to use one of their hosted plans. I do appreciate them making a self-hosted version available and supporting it as much as they do.
In summary, unless you have a strong use case for self-hosting and/or a good understanding of docker, it’s probably not worth the effort…or you just want to because you can.
As I was perusing some of the other threads I found this reference for grist-desktop that will allow unauthenticated grist-desktop access from your LAN: GRIST_DESKTOP_AUTH=none
and access it at: http://localhost:47478
documented here:
If you’re only looking at LAN access to your grist-desktop, this might be the best route.
Yes, I’m already using “GRIST_DESKTOP_AUTH=none” as the text in the grist-desktop created window is tiny on my 4k monitor. The view in my browser is much more readable.
Thanks for your comments about self-hosting. I have run one thing in Docker and found it a bit painful.
Oh yes, that was one of your other threads that I found that in.
You’ve probably already done this, but I use a 42" 4K TV as my monitor, and two of the first settings I change in Win 11 is setting the display scale to 125% and the accessibility text size larger than default, but I think you said you’re running Debian 12 in your other thread. I’d assume whichever desktop environment you’re using would have similar settings.
