I didn't plan to spend today building a home server. But here we are.
It started with a simple question: how do I check my battery from the terminal?
Six hours later I had a live website running on my own hardware, accessible
from anywhere in the world at leobunker.dev.
This is what happened.
The Setup
My laptop runs Linux in multi-user mode — no desktop, no Firefox, pure terminal.
Most people would call that a limitation. I call it a server.
Installing a Web Server
One command changed everything:
sudo apt install nginx
That's it. My laptop became a web server. I opened my phone, typed my local IP,
and saw a webpage served from my own machine. That moment hit different.
Building the Page
I wrote a custom HTML page with a dark hacker aesthetic — black background,
green terminal font, post feed, sidebar and milestone tracker. The kind of page
that says "I built this myself."
Getting It on the Internet
This was the tricky part. My laptop sits behind a home router, so I couldn't
just expose it directly. I used Cloudflare Tunnel — a free tool that creates
a secure connection between my server and Cloudflare's network.
No port forwarding. No exposing my IP. Just:
cloudflared tunnel --url http://localhost:80
And suddenly leobunker.dev was live. From anywhere. On my laptop.
Setting Up Ghost
Then I decided to go further and install Ghost — a professional blogging
platform — directly on my server. MySQL, Node.js, Nginx, SSL. All configured
and running on the same machine.
It broke. Several times. Wrong ports, database permission errors, failed
installs. Each one taught me something.
Eventually it worked.
What I Learned Today
- Linux in server mode is just Linux doing what it was built for
- A web server is just a program that listens on port 80
- Cloudflare Tunnel is magic for home servers
- Every error message is documentation if you read it carefully
- Breaking things is faster than reading about them
What's Next
- About page and proper blog setup
- Docker
- Kubernetes (the end goal).
This blog runs on my laptop, in my room, in Guadalajara.
And that's exactly how I like it.
— Leo RH.