Improve self-hosted getting started docs

[leggetter]

I've walked through the self-hosted docs where we encourage installation on Digital Ocean. Getting PostHog up and running on DO is definitely easy. However, I'd like to either clarify what additional steps are required to use this deployment on a hobby app or make changes to improve the steps to make that easier.

My process so far:

• Signup for a DO account and get $100 credit 🥳
• Click the 1-click install app. Initially, this doesn't seem to work and instead, you are taken to your main account screen. If you then create a k8 cluster and follow the process (click to install) you are prompted to either use an existing cluster or create a new cluster. I'll need to create a new account to verify this. If there is a problem we should add a callout/note.
• Find external IP address and navigate to it
• Setup an A name so that you're no longer using an IP address
• Setup an SSL certificate - I'm stuck here so would appreciate some help

[jamesefhawkins]

This is a great example of taking docs written by our engineering team and making them more accessible. That means far more growth :) Definitely worth doing this sort of thing, especially for all the critical hurdles to getting PostHog up and running.

[leggetter]

@tiina303 @fuziontech - would it be possible to have a setup where we could access the IP address over HTTPS? This means you can avoid the domain setup.

[Twixes]

Technically it's possible, but it's more effort than with a domain name and ends up being subpar, so almost nobody does that.

[leggetter]

At the moment I'm stuck on step 3: create/update values.yml. The next step also looks daunting as there's mention of helm that hasn't been required up until this point and we provide no pointers on where to get started.

[tiina303]

I forgot to link to helm there, I linked to it just a bit below in the manual section. Basically it's https://helm.sh/docs/intro/install/#through-package-managers so brew install helm on a mac.

So to narrow it down there are these parts in step 3:

• create a values.yaml file
• get kubectl & point it to your DO cluster
• install helm
• run the 3 commands for upgrading

Where are you at?

[leggetter]

Thanks, @tiina303. Got this working. For the web, you can use PostHog via http://{ip_address} on your development server running localhost which I believe provides a suitable validation point.

As discussed, if folks want a self-hosted version running over HTTPS they'll need to understand helm charts 👍