I'm nearing completion of a historical renovation to get a nano-brewery off the ground, where I would like to host hacker-friendly events.<p>With both that in mind and personal preferences that reflect much of the caution found here on HN, I'd like to run as little customer data as possible through or to the major vendors' and marketing ecosystems.<p>Anyone here have suggestions for a maintainable, self-hostable stack to cover typical brick-and-mortar SMB needs? I am a fairly proficient python programmer who's got a number of professional ML and personal RPi projects under my belt. I am not afraid to code, edit YAMLS, or write scripts to modify config files or a database - but have also learned the value of not reinventing the wheel.<p>Here's some areas of interest:<p>-Web presence (wordpress? pythonic alternative?)
-Retail sales (just beer and schwag, no food)
-Online sales (Stripe alternatives if I DIY, self-hosted shopify?)
-Event calendaring & booking (we have a separate space on top of the taproom I'd like to host events in, like tech privacy talks!)
-Smart Home - IoT devices for locks, cameras, environmental monitoring. (Home Assistant, NodeRed, something else?)<p>It turns out if you want anything other than cash and old school CCTV, you immediately get into a vendor matrix I don't really want to opt myself and all my customers into. Most of us can't usually avoid credit cards, but beyond that, it would be nice to provide a modest refuge for my customers.<p>Genuine thanks for any thoughts, especially from other HNers with businesses in the physical world - levinb
Making better beer and having better customer service are your core competencies-- those are what will set you apart from your competitors. I'd outsource just about everything else and focus on your differentiating factors.<p>I expect you will regret any time spent on self-hosting.
First instinct: I would personally start with Nextcloud and then fill in the blanks. It covers a lot of ground, file sharing, collaborative document editing, calendars, contacts.<p>You don't explicitly mention some of these, but they're inevitably part of all businesses.<p>Odoo was the best self hosted ERP last time I looked (although it wasn't recent). IIRC it handles point of sale as well as online purchases. Best if you use it for inventory mgmt too. Some components are paid.<p>One of my favorite resources on the internet is <a href="https://awesome-selfhosted.net/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://awesome-selfhosted.net/</a> You'll find hidden gems in all the categories you listed.<p>Edit: actually, first instinct is to follow philomath_mn's advice and self host the minimum amount of services. Even with a small off-the-shelf NAS collecting video footage there's always some maintenance going on. This is a fine hobby, but can be a distraction from the real thing.
You could checkout<p><a href="https://mailbox.org/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://mailbox.org/</a>.<p>It's a pretty cool service for most stuff you mentioned and it values privacy.<p>- cloud storage<p>- online office (calendar, documents, etc.)<p>- mail<p>- video conferencing<p>For more specific stuff (Smart home) you could go for Proxmox combined with zfs-auto-snapshot and some docker LXC and shared directories. Pretty easy to setup (once you are familiar) and rock solid (at least for my self-hosting use case) - even a good level of ransomware protection, if configured correctly.<p>Here is a sample project using proxmox with some self-hosted services (not a recommendation, just an example): <a href="https://github.com/bashclub/zamba-lxc-toolbox">https://github.com/bashclub/zamba-lxc-toolbox</a>
There are much more niche-centric ERP, CMS, POS software companies out there. Something must exist? I find these opportunities fascinating, but industry knowledge is clearly key. I will try to think of some examples I have seen. Anyone else have some they can share?