RFC: Easy self hosted Noodle

[ixahmedxi]

Noodle can only grow with the OSS / self-hosted community to back it up. I have been gaining a lot of interest in the home server/homelab area and Noodle is by far not an easy thing to self host, this is due to different reasons.

• No docker image supplied.
• No docs.
• Heavy reliance on 3rd party services.

At best, you would have a docker file needing you to # to multiple services and populate the environment variables just to get it running.

Thoughts:

• What if we have support for different database types, would be really cool to allow noodle to just create a simple SQLite file on the user's filesystem if they want for very easy local DB, and they can also supply it a postgres database if they want to.
• Authentication will have to be migrated to something like next-auth or lucia away from clerk, this should be easy tbh, the only hard bit I see is the effort needed to create the user settings, management UI for the user.
• Instead of upstash we can utilise a normal redis instance.
• Sending emails, we currently use Resend, so probably will need to move to jsx-email instead of react-email, allow the usage of Resend but also allow using some sort of a custom smtp server to send emails, also allow just no email sending at all.
• We will need to also create docs to aid in this, something like fumadocs with our utilisation of Next.js for the app should be fine.
• Ship a Noodle docker image to the docker registry probably?
• Provide a sample for a docker-compose file with redis, postgres, smtp server?
• I'm also open to utilising the docker efforts for the hosted version of Noodle, I'm not strict about keeping any part of the tech stack if it makes self-hosting Noodle hard/unfeasable.

Would love some more feedback on this.

NOTE: This is probably going to be a post Beta effort, just starting the discussion now should clear the path for later on.