Host Confluence for my family

[Andy]

Hello,

I was introduced to Confluence at work around 2 years ago and fell in love with it.  I work in IT and it's perfect for documentation.

I would love to get my family to use it too (Kids too, for their studies) and I was wondering what my cheapest options are?  I guess I could run a Linux server in my home, but I want to keep this online and be accessible externally too.  I could NAT the public routers IP to the private IP etc, but I wondered if anyone is running Confluence on Linux in the Cloud somewhere like Azure or AWS?  I will only need around 6 users to connect too,  so I think the license without Jira for the year is an amazing £10pa.

Any advise would be great.

Thanks

[Thomas Deiler]

Dear @Andy ,

having the power consumption of an own server at home on the radar, I recommend to get a virtual root server for € 5 / month.

So long

Thomas

[Bill Bailey]

Yeah, but once you get a server that meets the memory and CPU requirements, it is more expensive than that.

[Thomas Deiler]

Dear @Bill Bailey ,

I drive one for the upper fee with 2 CPU and 4G mem. That's pretty enough for a starter license.

So long

Thomas

[Jonathan Smith]

Trello is also fun for homes.

Trello boards for recipes, home improvements, ... to do chores like laundry.

[Andy]

That looks like a Kanban in Jira?

[Jonathan Smith]

It is a stand-alone product from Atlassian.

You guys can set up a free account and give it a shot. 

• It is like Kanboards.

[Andy]

Can it be used for documentation like Confluence?

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

No, Trello is a lightweight issue tracker, not a place to write docs

[Bill Bailey]

I run my Confluence server on GigaByte BRIX (small form-factor PC), under CentOS 7 (plus a spare SSD I had lying around). It is just mounted on the wall next to my router, and then I have the needed ports route to that server. I even have a reverse proxy so that I can run Drupal on it. And I have a home server for other needs (like recording surveillance video).

Also good way for kids to start to learn about Linux, etc.

[Andy]

I like the sound of this.  Can Confluence be installed on the non GUI flavour of Linux as it would be great to learn that way too?

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

Yep, I'm running my home confluence on a "minimal" linux distribution - there's no gui, and not even most of the other things you get from a standard install.  Confluence, ssh and a backup tool are about the only things on it.

[Andy]

I want to try this as it will make me learn Linux.  Did you follow their instructions off their website for this type of install?

What version of minimal Linux did you use?

I wonder if a Pi4 would run it for my home.

Excited.

[Bill Bailey]

The current instructions are pretty good, and the install process is much easier than it used to be. But yes, you can install and control Confluence from the command line. I used a standard distro of CentOS to make things easy. I did use the GUI just for the install and initial configuration of the OS.

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

I agree with @Bill Bailey about the instructions and process for the more recent versions (it's been pretty straightforward since 5.1-ish added a load of wizardy things)

I have tried Confluence (and Jira) on Pi, using "Dietpi" for really minimal installs - I'd forget it on a 1 or 2, but  a Pi 3 can bring up Confluence 6 and works passably for a couple of people after you disable collaborative editing.  I've not tried a Pi 4 for this sort of stuff yet.

If you are going to be using Pi-s, or even other "small"/"low power" single-board machines,  I would strongly recommend a look a https://dietpi.com/ - it's seriously minimal - a baseline install comes up running fewer than 20 processes (a bog standard Ubuntu or CentOS start around 130 before you add a GUI to them)

[Bill Bailey]

@Nic Brough -Adaptavist-, what about the lack of main memory for the Pi? Seems like only the new Pi 4 would have near enough. Newest versions are asking for 6GB min?

I had tried on a version 5 sometime back, and the lack of mem in the Pi would cause Confluence to come to crawl.

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

Memory is the main problem, I skipped over it.  While it runs ok on a pi3 with synchrony off, I cannot say it "works".  Do not do that.