How I ran uptime-kuma on termux with cloudflare tunnels⌗

The project uptime-kuma is the first ever piece of software I have self hosted. Previously, I was scared of self hosting because…

1. I was not aware of what hardware requirements would be sufficient for my needs
2. What I even wanted to self host
3. Domain names and IP Addresses (I don’t want to expose my home IP Address)

Through research, I found my answers

1. Literally any piece of hardware that can connect to the interne and has a reasonable cpu/memory and storage for my needs. I don’t plan on doing anything crazy, so small devices would work just fine (such as the old android phones lying around and unused).
2. If I wanted to selfhost nextcloud, I would want to have a sufficient amount of storage space to do so. Hosting websites was stopped by problem number 3. However, when I made my website (https://abhay7.dev) using https://replit.com, which periodically switches off vm instances, I needed an http pinger to keep it up. As a result, I decided on uptime kuma, which was very simple to self host and served my purpose
3. I moved my website over to cloudflare and their service of tunnels helped solved all my issues, as all I needed was to install cloudflared, login, configure, and I would have my server running on localhost exposed to the web with its own seperate IP address.

The setup⌗

1. The first thing I did was delete everything off the device I was using to self host. Using adb allowed me to quickly debloat everything excluding the system apps and termux. Speaking of termux, that is what I am using as my terminal emulator for android. I did not need to root my phone. (Termux is available at https://github.com/termux/termux-app).

2. pkg upgrade && pkg install openssh No one wants to type a bunch of commands on a puny screen with an onscreen keyboard. I upgraded packages and installed openssh for a quick ssh server.sshdon termux to start the server. Can be killed with pkill sshd

3. From my laptop, ssh [email protected] -p 8022 Lands my straight into my terminal emulator. From here, my guide was this github issue on uptime-kuma on how to host it on an android device.

4. pkg install clang make python nodejs-lts binutils git is all I need.

5. git clone https://github.com/louislam/uptime-kuma.git && cd uptime-kuma so that we actually get the software

6. npm run setup - This takes a while, as it compiles a customized version of sqlite, but it will work. After this is complete, you can test out the server by node server/server.js. The app by default runs on port 3001, so navigating to 192.168.0.XXX:3001 yields the admin dashboard!

7. The next step was to install pm2. Simple as npm i -g pm2. pm2 start server/server.js --name uptime-kuma was all I needed to start the server.

8. Now I needed to connect to cloudflare. I connected my domain to cloudflare by making an account, setting nameservers, etc. But now I needed to make a tunnel to my subdomain. For this, I followed the command line tutoral on how to setup cloudflare tunnels.

9. pkg install cloudflared
   cloudflared tunnel login # Outputs a link to authorize cloudflared
   cloudflared tunnel uptime-kuma-tunnel
   cd ~/.cloudflared
   
   ls # look for the json file, copy the file name
   
   nano config.yml # add the following
   

   url: http://localhost:3001
   tunnel: <Tunnel-UUID-From-Json-File>
   credentials-file: /root/.cloudflared/<Tunnel-UUID>.json
   

   # Finish with the following
   cloudflared tunnel route dns uptime-kuma-tunnel status.example.com
   
   cloudflared tunnel run # Run the tunnel
   

   We can add this to pm2 by running pm2 start "cloudflared tunnel run"

The end result is uptime kuma running on our own device but available on the internet! Check out https://status.abhay7.dev for a working example :)