A guide to self-hosting web apps on a VPS

02 Jun 2026

If you have not chosen a VPS provider, the following are what I've used

• Digitalocean
• Vultr
• Hostinger

So now you got yourself an account on a VPS provider and you plan to host your dream project(s) on it. Well done, fellow traveller. Let our journey commence!

Table of contents

1. Choosing a server
2. Configuring our server
   1. tmux
   2. A new user
   3. Configuring ssh on the server
   4. Setting up a webapp on the server
      • DNS
      • Installing runtimes and dependencies
      • Application directories
      • Setting up nginx
      • Certbot HTTPS
3. Finishing up

Choosing a server

Configuring our server

dev$ ssh root@12.13.14.15 

dev$ ssh admin@12.13.14.15 

dev$ ssh admin@12.13.14.15 -i /path/to/private-key.pem 

Host myvps Hostname 12.13.14.15 User admin IdentityFile /path/to/private-key.pem 

dev$ ssh myvps 

chmod 700 ~/.ssh chmod 600 ~/.ssh/id_* chmod 600 ~/.ssh/config chmod 644 ~/.ssh/*.pub 

server$ sudo apt update server$ sudo apt upgrade 

server$ sudo apt install tmux neovim git curl htop 

1. tmux

server$ nano ~/.tmux.conf 

# Index starts from 1 set-option -g base-index 1 set-option -g pane-base-index 1 # Renumber windows when a window is closed set-option -g renumber-windows on # no login shell set -g default-command "${SHELL}" # 256-color terminal set -g default-terminal "tmux-256color" # use 256 colors instead of 16 # Add truecolor support (tmux info | grep Tc) set-option -ga terminal-overrides ",xterm-256color:Tc" # Mouse set-option -g mouse on # Reload ~/.tmux.conf bind-key R source-file ~/.tmux.conf \; display-message "Reloaded!" 

server$ tmux 

We should see a green bar at the bottom indicating that we are in a tmux session. Here's a quick video on how to use tmux.

Whenever I login into my server, this is what I do

server$ tmux ls 0: 1 windows (created Tue Jun 24 23:19:42 2025) server$ tmux a -t 0 # or which ever session 

2. A new user

server# adduser jim 

server# usermod -aG sudo jim 

server# su - jim 

server$ sudo cp -r /root/.ssh ~/.ssh [sudo] password for jim: 

server$ chmod 700 ~/.ssh server$ chmod 644 ~/.ssh/authorized_keys 

dev$ ssh jim@12.13.14.15 

3. Configuring ssh on the server

server$ sudo cp /etc/ssh/sshd_config /etc/ssh/sshd_config.orig server$ sudo vim /etc/ssh/sshd_config 

Port 2202 PermitRootLogin no PasswordAuthentication no 

#PermitRooLogin yes 

PermitRootLogin no 

server$ sudo service ssh restart 

dev$ ssh jim@12.13.14.15 -i /path/to/private-key.pem -p 2202 

Host myvps Hostname 12.13.14.15 Port 2202 User jim IdentityFile /path/to/private-key.pem 

dev$ ssh myvps 

4. Setting up a webapp on the server

This guide will use a web server program called nginx. Almost all webserver software allows one to host multiple websites on a single vps/server. Apache pioneered this technique and this is exactly what we need to host multiple projects on a single VPS.

Here's our hypothetical webapp

• https://myapp.com is a react.js SPA.
• https://myapp.com/api is a nodejs api that the above react frontend would consume.
• https://api.myapp.com is the same nodejs api as above.

Assuming, we bought the domain myapp.com ofcourse.

4.1 DNS

A @ 12.13.14.15 

4.2 Installing runtimes and dependencies

server$ curl -fsSL https://deb.nodesource.com/setup_23.x -o nodesource_setup.sh server$ sudo -E bash nodesource_setup.sh server$ sudo apt-get install -y nodejs server$ node -v 

Refer nodesource for latest instructions on how to install node if you are reading this in the very future.

Now lets set up our database.

a. sqlite

server$ sudo apt install sqlite3 

.headers on .mode column 

server:/var/projects/dbs$ sqlite3 myapp.db 

Onto installing postgres. Latest instructions for doing that are available on the postgres website. Run the following one by one on the server.

sudo apt install curl ca-certificates sudo install -d /usr/share/postgresql-common/pgdg sudo curl -o /usr/share/postgresql-common/pgdg/apt.postgresql.org.asc --fail https://www.postgresql.org/media/keys/ACCC4CF8.asc . /etc/os-release sudo sh -c "echo 'deb [signed-by=/usr/share/postgresql-common/pgdg/apt.postgresql.org.asc] https://apt.postgresql.org/pub/repos/apt $VERSION_CODENAME-pgdg main' > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/pgdg.list" sudo apt update sudo apt -y install postgresql 

Next we setup a database user with which we can access the application database from the myapp backend.

server$ sudo su - postgres -c "createuser myappdbuser --pwprompt" 

The above prompts you for a password for the myappdbuser.

Create the application database, if not done so already.

server$ sudo su - postgres -c "createdb myapp_db" 

Now we grant acces to myappdbuser to myapp_db.

server$ sudo -u postgres psql psql> GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON DATABASE myapp_db TO myappdbuser; 

The connection string for your application would look like so

postgres://myappdbuser:s3cr3tPass@localhost:5432/myapp_db 

If you decided to host the database on a separate vps,

server$ sudo cp /etc/postgresql/<version>/main/postgresql.conf /etc/postgresql/<version>/main/postgresql.conf.orig server$ sudo vim /etc/postgresql/<version>/main/postgresql.conf 

Look for the line that says

#listen_addresses = 'localhost' 

and change it to

listen_addresses = 'localhost,10.2.3.4' # the above is the private ip for the database vps 

Restart postgres

server$ sudo service postgresql restart 

Now the connection string for your application would look like so

postgres://myappdbuser:s3cr3tPass@10.2.3.4:5432/myapp_db 

c. mysql/mariadb

server$ sudo apt install mariadb-server server$ sudo mysql_secure_installation 

In the prompts that follow

Enter current password for root (enter for none): Switch to unix_socket authentication [Y/n] n Change the root password? [Y/n] Y 

Set the new root password and we're all set. Lets create a new database user instead of using root for our day to day.

server$ sudo mariadb 

Next, we'll create the user

MariaDB [(none)]> GRANT ALL ON announcing-litebb.md announcing-poof.md announcing-spb-lil.md autologin-sway-debian.md better-font-rendering-linux.md color-me-baby.md copy-paste-vim-slackware.md dwm-st-installation.md hello-lc230.md install-docker-linux.md javascript-callbacks-promises-async-await.md lubuntu-i3wm-awesomeness.md minimal-unix-setup-sowm.md multiple-ssh-keys-for-services.md no-more-blurry-fonts.md openbsd-getting-started.md polkit-thunar-mount.md self-hosting-webapps.md setting-up-neomutt-offlineimap-msmtp.md __skeleton.md__ slackware-install-lvm-luks.md slackware-kernel-patch-install.md slackware-post-install.md swaywm-on-debian-11.md vim-to-neovim.md xml.xml TO 'admin'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'p4ssw0rd' WITH GRANT OPTION; MariaDB [(none)]> FLUSH PRIVILEGES; 

Please note, what we did here was making a user similar to root. We'll create an application specific user next that we'll use for our myapp webapp.

MariaDB [(none)]> CREATE DATABASE myapp_db; MariaDB [(none)]> GRANT ALL ON myapp_db.* TO 'myappdbuser'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'N3wp4ssw0rd' WITH GRANT OPTION; MariaDB [(none)]> FLUSH PRIVILEGES; MariaDB [(none)]> exit 

The connection string for our application would look like so

mysql://myappdbuser:N3wp4ssw0rd@localhost:3306/myapp_db 

If we decide to run mariadb on a separate VPS, make the following edit in /etc/mysql/my.cnf

... bind-address = 10.2.3.4,127.0.0.1 ... 

Then restart the service

server$ sudo service mariadb restart 

The connection string will now look like so,

mysql://myappdbuser:N3wp4ssw0rd@10.2.3.4:3306/myapp_db 

4.3 Application directories

server$ sudo mkdir -p /var/projects/myapp.com/{frontend,backend} server$ sudo chown -R $USER /var/projects/myapp.com 

dev:frontend$ npm run build dev:frontend$ ls ./ ../ dist/ src/ package.json 

dev:frontend$ tar -czf dist.tar.gz -C dist/ . 

dev:frontend$ scp -i ~/.ssh/private-key.pem \ -P 2202 \ dist.tar.gz jim@12.13.14.15:/var/projects/myapp/frontend 

dev:frontend$ ssh myvps "cd /var/projects/myapp/frontend; tar xzf dist.tar.gz; rm dist.tar.gz; ls" 

#!/bin/sh npm run build tar -czf dist.tar.gz -C dist/ . scp -i ~/.ssh/private-key.pem \ -P 2202 \ dist.tar.gz jim@12.13.14.15:/var/projects/myapp/frontend # or # scp dist.tar.gz myvps:/var/projects/myapp/frontend ssh myvps "cd /var/projects/myapp/frontend; tar xzf dist.tar.gz; rm dist.tar.gz; ls" 

dev:backend$ ls ./ ../ app/ .git/ node_modules/ package.json 

dev:backend$ tar -czf api.tar.gz node_modules app package.json 

dev:backend$ scp api.tar.gz myvps:/var/projects/myapp/backend 

dev:backend$ ssh myvps "cd /var/projects/myapp/backend; tar xzf api.tar.gz; rm api.tar.gz; ls" 

#!/bin/sh # npm run build # - if its a typescript backend tar -czf api.tar.gz node_modules app package.json # or if its a typescript backend # tar -czf api.tar.gz node_modules dist package.json scp -i ~/.ssh/private-key.pem \ -P 2202 \ api.tar.gz jim@12.13.14.15:/var/projects/myapp/backend # or #scp api.tar.gz myvps:/var/projects/myapp/backend # NOTE: tweak this as per your project. ssh myvps "cd /var/projects/myapp/backend; tar xzf api.tar.gz; rm api.tar.gz; ls" 

To run the backend, I use pm2. Create a file called pm2.config.cjs in /var/projects/myapp/backend with the following. You can check this in with git.

module.exports = { apps: [ { name: "myapp-api", script: "./app/index.js", }, ], }; 

And then I check if my project secrets in the file /var/projects/myapp/backend/.env are all set.

Then to run the backend, its a simple

server$ npx pm2 start pm2.config.cjs 

To see the logs

server$ npx pm2 logs myapp-api 

4.4 Setting up nginx

server$ sudo apt install nginx 

server$ sudo nvim /etc/nginx/sites-available/myapp_com.conf 

server { listen 80; root /var/projects/myapp/frontend/dist; index index.html index.htm; server_name myapp.com; location / { default_type "text/html"; try_files $uri.html $uri $uri/ /index.html; } # assumes the backend is running on port 3000 location /api { proxy_pass http://localhost:3000; proxy_http_version 1.1; proxy_set_header Upgrade $http_upgrade; proxy_set_header Connection 'upgrade'; proxy_set_header Host $host; proxy_cache_bypass $http_upgrade; } } 

server$ sudo nvim /etc/nginx/sites-available/api_myapp_com.conf 

server { listen 80; server_name api.myapp.com; # assumes the backend is running on port 3000 location / { proxy_pass http://localhost:3000; proxy_http_version 1.1; proxy_set_header Upgrade $http_upgrade; proxy_set_header Connection 'upgrade'; proxy_set_header Host $host; proxy_cache_bypass $http_upgrade; } } 

server$ sudo ln -s /etc/nginx/sites-available/myapp_com.conf /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/myapp_com.conf server$ sudo ln -s /etc/nginx/sites-available/api_myapp_com.conf /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/api_myapp_com.conf 

server$ sudo service nginx restart 

server$ sudo nginx -t 

server$ sudo service nginx reload 

4.5 Certbot HTTPS

server$ sudo apt install certbot python3-certbot-nginx server$ sudo certbot --nginx -d myapp.com -d api.myapp.com 

server$ sudo systemctl list-timers | grep certbot 

Finishing up

server$ sudo apt-get update server$ sudo apt upgrade server$ sudo apt dist-upgrade server$ sudo apt-cache clean 

If I had been patient, it would have saved me time. One such instance is following.

From my early blogs, you might know I am using mutt to do email. Just after I get along with mutt, I started using notmuch. Because limit search in mutt is always a pain when you have multiple folders. And what better tool out there than notmuch-mutt to bind both these.

notmuch-mutt provide three macros by default.

macro index <F8> \
"<enter-command>set my_old_pipe_decode=\$pipe_decode my_old_wait_key=\$wait_key nopipe_decode nowait_key<enter>\
<shell-escape>notmuch-mutt -r --prompt search<enter>\
<change-folder-readonly>`echo ${XDG_CACHE_HOME:-$HOME/.cache}/notmuch/mutt/results`<enter>\
<enter-command>set pipe_decode=\$my_old_pipe_decode wait_key=\$my_old_wait_key<enter>" \
      "notmuch: search mail"
macro index <F9> \
"<enter-command>set my_old_pipe_decode=\$pipe_decode my_old_wait_key=\$wait_key nopipe_decode nowait_key<enter>\
<pipe-message>notmuch-mutt -r thread<enter>\
<change-folder-readonly>`echo ${XDG_CACHE_HOME:-$HOME/.cache}/notmuch/mutt/results`<enter>\
<enter-command>set pipe_decode=\$my_old_pipe_decode wait_key=\$my_old_wait_key<enter>" \
      "notmuch: reconstruct thread"
macro index <F6> \
"<enter-command>set my_old_pipe_decode=\$pipe_decode my_old_wait_key=\$wait_key nopipe_decode nowait_key<enter>\
<pipe-message>notmuch-mutt tag -- -inbox<enter>\
<enter-command>set pipe_decode=\$my_old_pipe_decode wait_key=\$my_old_wait_key<enter>" \
      "notmuch: remove message from inbox"

One for search, one for reconstructing threads and one for manipulating tags, which I missed.

Now my impatient part. I have already mapped f6 for my folder movements and in my initial days of notmuch, I only use just search. So I never cared about the f6 macro provided by notmuch-mutt. As time goes by I got very comfortable with notmuch. I was stretching my notmuch legs. I started to live more on notmuch search results date:today tag:unread than more on the mutt index. To the problem, since notmuch-mutt dump all results to a temp maildir location, can’t perform flag changes back to the original maildir which was annoying, because we need to distinguish what mail you read and what not when you subscribed to most of all debian mailing list.

I was under the impression that, the notmuch-mutt is not capable of doing so and I just went like that without checking docs. I started doing all crazy hack to sync these maildirs.

I even started reading notmuch-mutt codebase.

Later, I settled on notmuch-vim. Cause I can manipulate flags sync back from notmuch to maildir.

And while searching for something, I accidentally revisited the the the notmuch-mutt macro page and saw the tag manipulation. I was like :( .

If I read about the third macro patiently when added that to config, I could’ve saved time by not doing ugly hacks around it.

I think I learned my lesson.

On the 7th of September 2025, my friend Dione and I had a day trip to Vienna—the capital of Austria. We were attending a conference in Budapest, Hungary, which is 250 km from Vienna. So, it was a good opportunity to visit Vienna.

We took a morning train from Budapest to Vienna and got back to Budapest by night. However, booking these tickets turned out to be a bit complicated. There were many websites to book the train ticket—Hungarian Railways, Austrian Railways, and third-party sites such as Omio. All these websites had different prices for the same ticket.

I booked the tickets from the Hungarian Railways website as it was the cheapest. The train from Budapest to Vienna was €13, operated by Eurocity. Also, I had to pay €2 for the seat reservation on top. The train from Vienna to Budapest—operated by Railjet—was €21, along with €2 extra for reservation again—making it €23. The tickets for the two-way journey added up to €38.

The cost of these tickets varied depending on when one purchses them: the sooner you purchase, the lower the price. I bought my tickets 15 days ahead of the date of journey and paid just €38. In contrast, Dione booked just one day before her trip and paid around €100 for her tickets.

As for the seat reservation, long-distance trains in Europe usually require paying extra for the seat reservation. This ensures that you get your preferred seat, such as a window seat or an aisle seat. Nevertheless, you will get a seat on long-distance trains because they do not sell more tickets than there are seats. Therefore, you will get a seat without reservation as well. However, we reserved our seats so that we can sit together. This helped us more in the return part of the journey—from Vienna to Budapest—which was more crowded than the train we took from Budapest to Vienna in the morning.

On another note, reservation is mandatory on some trains in Europe, but ours wasn’t one of them. In addition, people also use rail passes, so an extra charge is required on top for reserving the seats for pass holders. On the other hand, local trains do not require seat reservations in general.

Our train’s scheduled departure was at 08:55 from the Budapest Kelenfold station. We reached the train station 40 minutes before the train’s scheduled departure. The Kelenfold station had free Wi-Fi, which was handy because I didn’t have a local SIM.

Our train arrived on time. I tried to find our coach number but could not find the numbers written anywhere on the side of the coach. Luckily, we were helped by a fellow passenger who directed me to look at the doors, where the numbers were mentioned clearly!

Then we got into our compartment and took our respective seats. Our tickets were checked twice - once while the train was in Hungary and the other when in Austria. Showing the PDF of the train ticket on our mobile to the ticket inspector was good enough for the purpose. Austria and Hungary are a part of the open transit Schengen area, which means this was the extent of the border control checks we had to go through.

The train also had free Wi-Fi, albeit with poor connection at times. There were no eatery options inside the train.

We deboarded at the Wien Hauptbahnhof station in Vienna. The journey was 250 km and took 2.5 hours, reaching Vienna at 11:25, which was the scheduled time.

At the station, we bought a 24-hour public transport pass from a ticket machine for €8. The pass includes unlimited access to all the public transport in Vienna for 24 hours. My pass was valid from the 7th of September at 11:34 to the 8th of September at 11:33. A single public transport ticket (from anywhere to anywhere) costs €2.4. A single ticket of €2.4 can be used once on any public transport in Vienna—trams, metros, and buses.

Therefore, the pass is a good deal if you are going to take at least four public transport trips in a day. Unlike the public transport pass I got in Budapest, the pass in Vienna was anonymous and not tied to the rider’s name.

We wanted to visit the Schönbrunn Palace. The palace was reachable by subway. In order to get to the subway station, we started by going outside the station. But it was not outside. So we came back inside the station building and realized that the subway was underground.

We took the subway and deboarded at the Schönbrunn subway station—the closest one to the palace. The ride was smooth; the train was pretty silent.

By the way, like Budapest, there were no AFC gates for boarding the subway in Vienna. The stations had ticket validators instead, where you are supposed to validate your tickets before getting into the subway.

These validators are in place to ensure that you use your ticket only once. Unlike AFC gates, which are present in metros of most of the countries I have been to, the ticket validators don’t act as a physical barrier to enter the boarding area.

If you board the metro without validating your ticket, you will be facing hefty fines upon getting caught. I have heard that the fine is around €100. On the other hand, if you have a public transport pass like we did, then you don’t need to validate it before boarding.

In addition, there were no annoying security checks either, unlike in Indian cities. In the Delhi metro, for example, you would need to scan your bags and pass through a security check before getting to the AFC gates.

Now back to the story, after alighting at the Schönbrunn subway station, we walked to the Schönbrunn Palace. One can roam around outside the palace and click pictures for free. To go inside, however, requires buying tickets. The tickets for the palace can be booked in advance on the internet. We didn’t take the tickets in advance, as we decided to visit the palace at the last moment.

So we went to the ticket counter and found out that we needed to wait for 1 hour 40 minutes before going inside if we took the tickets at that moment. In addition, one ticket costs €44 (around 4000 Indian rupees). Since we had to return to Budapest in the evening and only had a few hours in the city, we decided not to go inside the palace. Instead, we clicked a few pictures outside the palace.

The Schönbrunn Palace is a UNESCO World Heritage Site and is a historically significant place. It served as one of the residences of the powerful Habsburg dynasty. The palace looked so good that my friend Dione said, “It seemed like the palace was built yesterday”. This remark applied to other parts of Vienna we went to. For example, the subway stations also seemed like they were built yesterday.

Now, we wanted to go someplace to grab a bite. I asked my friend Urbec for suggestions on where to go. They suggested we visit the steps named Strudlhofstiege, which had the added benefit of being in a neighborhood with good bakeries and buildings.

So, we took the subway and deboarded at the Roßauer Lände station, followed by walking around a kilometer to reach the stairs.

On the way, we were also looking for a place to eat. Unfortunately, it was Sunday, and Vienna closes on Sunday. That means most of the shops—including bakeries and cafés—are closed. Only places like railway stations have shops open on Sundays.

By the way, walking around in the streets of Vienna was a treat. The streets were not crowded (as it was not exactly a touristy neighborhood) and had good pedestrian infrastructure, with clean streets and separate cycling tracks. The buildings were also beautiful.

After some walking, we found a restaurant open. I grabbed the menu to check the prices. A lady at the shop asked me what I was doing, and I told her that I was browsing the menu. She said that the menu was in German. I don’t know how she knew that we didn’t know German, but it seemed like a racist thing to be told.

We roamed around further and found a café by the name of Blue Orange, where we ordered coffee and croissants. When we got our order, the waiter told us that they were having some issues, so they wouldn’t charge us for the croissant if it wasn’t good.

My friend and I took a bite, and both of us didn’t like the croissant. After some time, the waiter came to us and asked whether the croissant was okay, to which we said no. Therefore, they didn’t charge us for the croissant. This was the first time something like this happened to me. It felt like I was in a different world. I added a small tip at the end for this gesture, which I had to put in a jar at the counter.

The cappuccino I ordered was €4.50, while the espresso that Dione ordered was €3.60. The croissant would have been €3.60. I remember Paris having cheaper croissants!

Then when the waiter brought our drinks out, they automatically gave me the espresso and Dione the cappuccino. Dione found this funny because there is a stereotype in her country (Australia) that men drink strong black coffee, and women drink milky drinks like cappuccinos. She found it interesting that this stereotype seems to exist in Austrian culture too.

We hopped on a tram to reach the nearest subway station and went to the Wien Hauptbahnhof station to have something before we caught our return train to Budapest.

At the station, I had Esterhazyschnitten and Punschkrapfen (thanks, Urbec, for the suggestion). The lady at the shop warned me that punschkrapfen had alcohol in it, to which I said okay.

Esterhazyschnitten was a cake made of almonds, while punschkrapfen was a jam-filled sponge cake, soaked in rum. Esterhazyschnitten was my favorite out of the two. The punschkrapfen was too sweet for my taste.

While the station was well-built, there were a couple of things about the Wien Hauptbahnhof station that we didn’t like. There were no seats inside the station, so we had to eat outside the building. Also, the toilets needed to be paid for. It costs 50 cents to use the toilets at this station.

The Vienna train station had departure boards all over the place. So, we went to the platform our train was to arrive on.

When our train arrived, we had some difficulty locating our compartment. This train was operated by a different company (Railjet) than the one we took in the morning (Eurocity) from Budapest to Vienna, and we were able to locate the coach numbers using the digital board at the station. Each compartment had a digital board next to it on the station displaying the coach number. However, that wasn’t the problem. Even after reading the coach numbers and trying to find ours, it didn’t appear where we expected in the sequence.

When we were not able to find our coach for a while, we asked a ticket inspector of the train who was standing on the platform. He directed us towards the front side of the train. So we started running to the front side as we didn’t know how long the train stops.

As we ran toward our coach, we found out that the engine of the back train was connected with the last compartment of the train at the front. At that point, we realized that the train was a combination of two trains. At a later station, the train on the back side parted ways and went towards Vienna Airport.

We had a smooth journey and reached Budapest a couple of hours later.

Vienna is a beautiful city; we enjoyed being there, and we would like to visit the city again!

That’s it for now. Signing off. See you in the next one!

Credits: Thanks to Dione and Badri for proofreading.

Weekly notes is a genre where people chronicle their week on their blogs. Weekly notes are like a window. I love going through these, as they’re a steady stream of week on week happenings and progress in people’s lives. It shows people making efforts to improve: from basic things like learning to swim or drive, to planning long-term goals such as vacations, moving house, states, or even countries. In some cases, they carry internal monologues, thoughts, and anxieties. These are like a constant nudge for me to work on myself, like them.

These are the weekly notes I read nowadays:

• https://adhavansivaraj.xyz/tags/weekly-notes/
• https://learningwala.in/tags/weekly-notes/
• https://thejeshgn.com/category/weekly-notes/
• https://shrayas.com/tagged/weeknotes
• https://tracydurnell.com/category/weeknotes/
• https://sathyabh.at/

Most are there on Thejesh’s weekly notes planet which autoupdates when new posts arrive, usually starting on Friday evenings, and by Monday, almost everyone has posted.

It reminds of a word from The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows - Kenaway :

the longing to see how other people live their lives when they’re not in public; wishing you could tune in to the raw feed of another human existence, in all its messiness and solitude—shimmying in place while brushing their teeth, squabbling over where to put the shoes, talking out their problems on solitary commutes—if only to give you something to compare your own life against, and figure out whether you’re bizarrely normal or normally bizarre.

Close enough.

In September 2025, I attended the LibreOffice Conference in Budapest, Hungary, on the 4th and the 5th, and a community meeting on the 3rd. Thanks to The Document Foundation (TDF) for sponsoring my travel and accommodation costs. The conference venue was Faculty of Informatics, Eötvös Loránd University (ELTE).

The conference was planned to be held from the 4th to the 6th, but the program for the 6th of September had to be canceled due to the venue being unavailable because of a marathon in Budapest. So, all the talks got squeezed into just two days, making the schedule a bit hectic.

The TDF had booked my room at the Corvin Hotel. It was a double bedroom with a window. The breakfast was included in the hotel booking. The hotel was walking distance from the conference venue. One could also take a tram from the hotel to reach the venue.

3rd of September

On the 3rd of September, we had a community meeting at the above-mentioned venue. I walked with my friend Dione to the venue. Upon reaching there, I noticed that the university had no boundaries and gates. This reminded me of the previous year’s conference venue in Luxembourg, which also had no boundaries or gates.

In contrast, Indian universities and institutes typically have walls and gates serving as boundaries to separate them from the rest of the city. Many of these institutes also have security guards at the entrance, who may ask attendees to present proof of admission before allowing them inside. I was surprised to find that institutes in Europe, like the one where the conference was held, did not have such boundaries.

The building where the conference was held was red, which happened to be the same color as the building for the previous year’s conference venue. I remember joking with Dione that the criteria for the conference venue might have been the color of the building.

During the community meeting, we shared ideas on how to spread the word about LibreOffice. The meeting lasted for a couple of hours.

After the community meeting, we went to the hotel for dinner sponsored by the TDF.

4th of September

On the first day of the conference, attendees were given swag bags containing a pad, sticky notes, a pen, a conference T-shirt, and a bottle.

The talks started early in the morning with Eliane Domingos, Chairperson of TDF’s Board of Directors, giving the inauguration talk. As always, I found Italo Vignoli’s talk on the importance of document freedom interesting.

During the snack break, I noticed that there were three types of milk available for coffee: cow’s milk, lactose-free milk, and almond milk. Almond milk is rare in India, but I have managed to get it, but I have never seen lactose-free milk in India.

Since I run fundraisers in my projects, such as Prav, I could relate to Lothar K. Becker’s talk. He discussed the issue that certain implementations in LibreOffice require a budget that is too large for any single interested entity to fund independently. Furthermore, The Document Foundation (TDF) cannot legally receive funds from government entities. Therefore, there is no organization or entity to pool resources from all the interested entities to finance the implementation.

Another talk was by the Austrian Armed Forces on their migration to LibreOffice. I wanted to know why they migrated, and I found out that they did it for their digital sovereignty, and not for saving on the license costs. Another point presented in the talk was that LibreOffice is available on all the operating systems, while the Microsoft Office suite is not that widely available. The migration was systematic and was performed over a few years. They started working on it in 2021, and the migration was finished recently. In addition, it also required training their staff in using LibreOffice.

The lunch was inside the university canteen. We were provided lunch coupons by the TDF. I got a vegan coupon with 4000 Ft written on it, which meant I could take lunch for up to 4000 Hungarian forints.

During the evening, it was my turn for the presentation. I was done with preparing my slides ten days before my talk. I also got my slides reviewed by friends.

My talk was finished in 20 minutes, while I was given a 30-minute slot. This helped us catch up on the schedule. Furthermore, I made my talk interactive by asking questions and making sure that the audience was not asleep. During my talk, my friend Dione took my pictures with my camera.

My talk was on how free software projects could give users a say in freedom to modify the software. I illustrated this using the Prav project that I am a part of.

After the talks were over, we were treated to a conference dinner at Trofea Grill. It had a great selection of desserts, which helped me sample some Hungarian desserts. The sponge cake was especially good.

5th of September

The next day—the 5th of September—I went with Dione to the venue early in the morning, as her talk was the first one of the day. Her talk was titled Managing Tasks with Nextcloud Deck. Later that day, I also attended a talk on Collabora. At lunch, I found the egg white salad quite tasty.

After the lunch break, we had the conference group photo. I had a Nikon camera, which we used to take the group photo. I requested a university student to take our group photo and also taught her how to operate the camera.

By the evening, the conference ended, after which we went to a pub, which was again sponsored by TDF. I had beer, but that one really tasted bad, so I couldn’t finish it. The only vegetarian option was goat cheeseburger, which my friend Manish and I opted for. The burger tasted awful. Apparently, I don’t like goat cheese.

The next day I went sightseeing with Dione in Budapest. Stay tuned for our adventures!

Credits: Thanks to Dione and Richard for proofreading.

It started with a thought: to understand people’s perspectives on life and its meaning. So I texted folks, “What is life (to you)?”. Each of the following list items (-) is a response from a different individual, mostly verbatim.

- A lot

- Everyone has a few universal basic qualities, and some special qualities. To me life is pursuit of exploring world based on those qualities and maturing those qualities as one goes on about exploring world/life with those qualities.
Discovering and enhancing experiences as one goes through them.

- life is endless suffering

- my answer might change daily, but this is what I’ve noticed and feel recently. Life is a spectrum with two distinct ends: what we control and what we don’t. At birth, the spectrum is largely tilted toward control, but throughout our lives, it gradually shifts toward the other side. Ultimately, as we approach death, we lose all control over any aspect of our existence, reaching the other end of the spectrum.
tho this isn’t universal, privilege plays a huge part in what you control tho i believe it holds true for the majority
but yeah man, meaning and purpose are dynamic, it’s in their nature to change i can give you a different answer this evening itself xD

- Funeral Monologue from Synecdoche, New York. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z9PzSNy3xj0

- Zindagi ek nadiya hai, Aur mujhe tairna nahi aata
(translation - Life is a river, and I don’t know how to swim)
On a more serious note, Life is what you make it out for yourself. The only established truth is that it will end. We can never know if there is something after or if there was something before. So try to live a life that you feel aspired by? But this question was beautifully answered by that book which you had about that dying professor
(Me - He was talking about Tuesday’s with Morrie)

- My answer is 42

- One, it’s living on your own terms, you define everything for yourself, success, normal, whatever. You get to curate your version of it no matter the societal norms.
It’s an accumulation of experiences - friends, parents, work, activities, doing shit loads. Sab try karo- travel, zumba, art, music, workout, sports, dil kara ye karna hai karlo. (translation - If your heart wants to do it, just do it.)
Then I think relationships - all that you’ve nurtured, people forget maintaining people because of work. It takes efforts to keep people in your life, everyone that comes has a place in yours, how well thats stays is upto you. You also get to curate your people, who stays who don’t. Family toh hai hi (translation - family is there) but everyone else that comes along can make it pretty good.
So I don’t want to be 50 and be like chalo ab kuch apne liye karte hai… (translation - Come on, now let’s do something for ourselves) Do whatever shit you want today. Not everything costs money, and if it does get thrifty
But do keep healthy while doing all of that

- Being alive so that my daughter can grow up and i can help raising her kids as well. Raising kids without mother is tough :P

- Definitively, I feel like Life is a by product of proteins and energy working together. But in a more personal sense, Life is a dumb joke played onto us. It’s a rat race. But rats exists because of life and then it becomes a chicken-egg problem
Honestly, I don’t give good answers to life questions. I’m generally the one asking
Life can be like a box of chocolates, you don’t know what you’re gonna get untill you experience the chocolate(assuming the chocolates are heterogenous and contains a mix of everything)
Camus once said, “Life is a revolt�, and one of his students added more spice to it like “Life is a revolt against the meaninglessness of existence"
I kinda feel like Life is the pursuit of every person’s search for meaning

- Imprisonment waiting for execution 😄
I have one more thought while we are on the topic , game with pre defined starting position and predefined destination , path to reach is a maze

- A phase where you can have a really good time or really bad one, usually the mix of both. A phase where you are prisoner to responsibility and materialistic wants.
It’s a hell for you, where you try to create heaven for others. Being born was never your choice, but ending is always in your hands but you are a prisoner. You fear that leaving this world behind will destroy the heavens you created for others and they will be back to hell. But eventually everyone moves on watching the hourglass of their life.
Once you are left with no desires or no one to create heavens for, you look arround yourself. You see everyone chasing something, everyone scared of their limitted life time sliping away yet you want it to end sooner.
Doesn’t matter if it was all good till now, or all bad. The other half is waiting for redemption. If it was all good, it’s best time to die don’t wait for the bad to start. If was all bad, it’s still the best time to die what if it was the good one and more worst is waiting for you. We desire to be remembered, yet we want to free from this loop of suffering.
Someone once said, life is a suffering, chose your sufferings.

- Life to me is to live without regrets and live with freedom.
Life is always unpredictable and this unpredictability makes it more interesting and worth it.

- As of now, for the state of mind that I am in , I think for me life is about subtle struggle, subtle inconveniences and yet moving forward cause that’s all I know.
I am not sure if any of this has any meaning, but sometimes I feel I was born of a purpose and that the universe has my back.
For me it’s about raising my consciousness, understanding people to their depths, gaining moderate material success and helping people to some extend.
I have tried to seek a grander meaning but I have failed.
Life for me is what I make out it.
In my times of great success i rarely think about life for I am busy enjoying it, whatever you may call that state of mind.

- For me its the little things that you enjoy with YOUR people

- Life to me is about living and loving, and doing it in a way that sustains. It’s the people who shape you, the work you get absorbed in, the quiet moments in between. There’s also the wanting, the drive to figure out what’s worth going after and how to get there, but that’s just one part of it, not the point of it. And none of it happens in a vacuum. I’m aware of the privileges that let me live this way, and I try to hold on to that gratitude. In the end, life has both a material and a non-material side, and a lot of what we do is chasing material things in an attempt to satisfy something non-material within us

- Mere liye (translation - for me) life is staying at my home and studying random economics papers. That’s when I enjoy myself the most.

- Very complicated
Some days I wish this life never ended and some time I feel it would be better if it stopped at that moment.
It all depends on the events that happen in the so called “life”.
So life to me is a string of events that happen anyway and you get to make some decisions which can turn it in any direction and then you wonder how did that happen.

- not forgetting to breathe, learn, eat, game, take a good shit, love, sleep.

- To be honest it changed with time! At 19 it was about freedom, wasn’t sure what freedom meant but i wanted that! To be free from everything, maybe because parents still controlled a part of my life. Then came 22-24 where i was working, trying to figure out what i want, the meaning changed from freedom to living for myself. To earn more, to be greedy about myself and pursue whatever would help me gain more steps in my career.
Came my mba life, switched my life from doing for myself to trying everything out to have no regrets. Life meaning was just about living with no regrets, invested, gambled, did everything to earn that tag of “yeah, have tried that�. Now it has all switched to, it was all just a fake facade. Life turned to having a meaningful life rather than finding meaning in what i am doing. Living for people around me, chhoti chhoti cheezo m khushi (translation - happiness in small things(?)) isn’t really a topic of conversation but more of happy thing for me. So it changed, and m quite happy to be honest. Life did show me a lot of failures, but was privileged enough to face those failures. Gained a lot of learnings if not money😂
Hopeful for more learnings and change meaning of life with time

- A task.

- You have different answers at different times You learn different meanings at different times When you are studying, basically it is about job, finding a partner then it becomes, house, car other things based on your income in between, there can be passion too
Free Software was a passion, electoral politics too, but both kind of faded and I want cooperative and user driven development now (prav - something that motivates me every day) and these days learning Chinese and watching Cdrama takes a huge part of my leisure time it is heavily subjective and also influences by previous experiences people around you, how much influence they have on you
it also depends on if they had to struggle in their life or not, for some life did not give much troubles and trouble itself can be relative people who never had to struggle may find even smallest challenges as troubles like if you own a car, your worry is finding a parking slot

- I am too young to think about lyfe

- A ticket to see the show on earth, I guess 😀
I guess life is different depending on the mood. It is a very broad question.
(Me - What is it in this present mood?)
Learning stuff (like I am learning a new language) and being happy but also to regulate emotions in a world where being optimistic is getting harder each day.
Life is also having a unique set of glasses you wear. Both in terms of looking from your eyeballs and your psychological perspective. Both are unique and cannot be replicated.
It is interesting what people on their deathbed think of life. If I know I am dying, my perspective would change a whole lot.
Life is finishing reading books while we are alive 😉
Life is sleeping after a good XMPP chat 😉

- Dukh dard peeda (translation - surrow pain suffering)

- uhh to word it? life is just like a journey from A to somewhere and its all about what paths you take and what line you get on to me, just a series of short adventures that all connect to a larger sequence until you can’t have any more adventures-
(Me - eee, THE END. drop dead, like a coin)
yeaaaah- I am not really for spirituality of an afterlife, to me life just ends at some point, after which point there fails to remain a discernable you, and some X time after which, you will be last remembered, try to make that last time a good one I guess?
(Me - no soul?)
uhhh not in the way most people think of it i guess?
theres just a lot of yous, theres the physical you, there is the idea of you, there is the expectation of you, and one of the undefinable you I would label as the soul maybe? like the part thats not physically you, but also certainly you
(Me - can’t say I understood part, but I get you in this sense)
mhm- well its about just questioning who you are more so questioning what life is-, I have sadly spent way too much time trying to figure that out

- Making the best of the time you have

- living a full range of experiences and embracing the good ones, seeing all that the world has to offer. In the end we were always just stardust. Might as well enjoy it when we are stardust with a consciousness of our own.

- For some reason or the Universe’s /dev/random I was born here as a biological being, and from my experience I understood living is hard and the best way to live is by embracing it. Loving everyone and everything around you. Be happy and joyful until you naturally say good bye to this world.

- Life is being fucked by everything and you just have to figure out and try to stick to the things worth being fucked for

Note: Following was transcribed from a audio message.

- There are five conditions to become a life to survive in the environment. I think there’s five conditions by the biological definitions and reproduction is one of the factor virus is not considered a life form because it cannot reproduce on its own but technically it’s kind of a life because it reproduces using the DNA ability this is the biological definition. Do you want a philosophical definition?
My definition is kind of the same except that you get life experiences along with it as a human. Extra benefits is that you are not an NPC. All other organisms are NPCs. But humans can interpret the world and change it to their liking. That is life in the case of a human. But then many humans are mostly NPCs. But they still can change the life. Okay, fuck this. Where is this even going?
A human is an exception in the case of life, because human is not an NPC. Human can interrupt the world, human can change it to its liking, which is why we are such a successful organism on this planet. That is life to me. That’s a human. But all of this is kind of meaningless, because the biological impurity of a human being still exists, so you still have the urges to reproduce, which kind of makes it like just another organism. But then, humans are yet to evolve to overcome that biological imperative.

I’m grateful for all the replies, outlooks, and subsequent conversations I got to have after this question with everyone. After all, it was a deeply personal question. It does fit in nicely with my definition of life:
“Life is all about experiences and all the transient relationships one gets to have with folks we meet on the way.”

The annual LibreOffice conference 2025 was held in Budapest, Hungary, from the 3rd to the 6th of September 2025. Thanks to the The Document Foundation (TDF) for sponsoring me to attend the conference.

As Hungary is a part of the Schengen area, I needed a Schengen visa to attend the conference. In order to apply for a Schengen visa, one needs to get an appointment at VFS Global and submit all the required documents there, which are then forwarded to the embassy.

I got an appointment for a Hungary visa at VFS Global in New Delhi for the 24th of July. There were many appointment slots available for the Hungary visa. One could easily get an appointment for the next day at the Delhi center. There were some technical problems on the VFS website, though, as I was unable to upload a scanned copy of my passport while booking the appointment. I got an error saying, “Unfortunately, you have exceeded the maximum upload limit.”

The problem didn’t get fixed even after contacting the VFS helpline. They asked me to try in the Firefox browser and deleting all the cache, which I already did.

So I created another account with a different email address and phone number, after which I was able to upload my passport and book an appointment. Other conference attendees from India also reported facing some technical issues on the VFS Hungary website.

Anyway, I went to the VFS Hungary application center as per my appointment on the 24th of July. Going inside, I located the Hungary visa application counter. There were two applicants ahead of me.

When it was my turn, the VFS staff warned me that my passport was damaged. The “damage” was on the bio-data page. All the details could be seen, but the lamination of the details page wore off a bit. They asked me to write an application to the Embassy of Hungary in New Delhi stating that I insist VFS to submit my application along with describing the “damage” on my passport.

I got a bit worried about my application getting rejected due to the “damage.” But I decided to gamble my money on this one, as I didn’t have time (and energy) to apply for a new passport before this trip.

Moreover, I had struck down a couple of fields in my visa application form which were not applicable to me, due to which the VFS staff asked me to fill out another visa application.

After this, the application got submitted, and it was 11,000 INR (including the fee to book the appointment at VFS). Here is the list of documents I submitted:

• My passport

• Photocopy of my passport

• Two photographs of myself

• Duly filled visa application form

• Return flight ticket reservations

• Payslips for the last three months

• Invitation letter from the conference organizer (in Hungarian)

• Proof of hotel bookings during my stay in Hungary

• Cover letter stating my itinerary

• Income tax returns filed by me

• Bank account statement, signed and sealed by the bank

• Travel insurance valid for the period of the entire trip

It took 2 hours for me to submit my visa application, even though there were only two applicants before me. This was by far the longest time to submit a Schengen visa application for me.

Fast-forward to the 30th of July, and I received an email from the Embassy of Hungary asking me to submit an additional document - paid air ticket - for my application. I had only submitted dummy flight tickets, and they were enough for the Schengen visas I applied for until now. This was the first time a country was asking me to submit a confirmed flight ticket during the visa process.

I consulted my travel agent on this, and they were fairly confident that I will get the visa if the embassy is asking me to submit confirmed flight tickets. So I asked the travel agent to book the flight tickets. These tickets were ₹78,000, and the airline was Emirates. Then, I sent the flight tickets to the embassy by email.

The embassy sent the visa results on the 6th of August, which I received the next day.

My visa had been approved! It took 14 days for me to get the Hungary visa after submitting the application.

See you in the next one!

Thanks to Badri for proofreading.