this post was submitted on 22 Jul 2023
25 points (85.7% liked)

Selfhosted

37811 readers
517 users here now

A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.

Rules:

  1. Be civil: we're here to support and learn from one another. Insults won't be tolerated. Flame wars are frowned upon.

  2. No spam posting.

  3. Posts have to be centered around self-hosting. There are other communities for discussing hardware or home computing. If it's not obvious why your post topic revolves around selfhosting, please include details to make it clear.

  4. Don't duplicate the full text of your blog or github here. Just post the link for folks to click.

  5. Submission headline should match the article title (don’t cherry-pick information from the title to fit your agenda).

  6. No trolling.

Resources:

Any issues on the community? Report it using the report flag.

Questions? DM the mods!

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
25
PHP and security (lemmy.world)
submitted 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) by witten@lemmy.world to c/selfhosted@lemmy.world
 

The recent post about what people are using for webmail got me thinking about a perhaps irrational policy I have with my own self-hosted software: I don't install anything written in PHP, because I have this vague notion that PHP software is often insecure. I think I probably got this idea because years ago I saw all the vulnerabilities in PHP webmail clients and PHP software like Wordpress and decided that it was the language's fault—or at least a contributing factor.

Maybe this isn't fair. Maybe PHP is just more accessible to new devs and so they're more likely to gravitate to it and make security mistakes. Maybe my perception isn't even accurate, and webmail / blog software written in other languages is just as bad—but PHP gets all the the negative attention because it's so prevalent for web apps. Maybe my policy was a good idea, years ago, but now it's just out of date.

To be clear, I'm not trying to stoke the flames of a language holy war here or anything. I'm honestly asking: Is it maybe time to revisit my anti-PHP policy? I'm looking longingly at some federated software like Pixelfed and wondering if maybe I'm just being a little too close-minded.

So I'm interested in your own experiences and polices here. Where do you draw the security line for what you will or won't host, and what made you make that choice?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] tko@tkohhh.social 14 points 11 months ago (1 children)

I wrote my personal website in PHP, and I'm pretty happy with the security I've got going on. I'm not an expert, but I paid close attention to best practices to avoid pitfalls like SQL injection. My instinct is that it's certainly easy to code insecure applications in PHP (and probably many other languages as well), but the language does provide means by which to code safely.

[–] witten@lemmy.world 1 points 11 months ago (2 children)

Awesome, good to hear from an actual PHP dev. I assume then you're also fine self-hosting third-party PHP applications? How do you make the call on whether it's okay to host from a security perspective? The same as with software written in any other language?

[–] lemmyvore@feddit.nl 5 points 11 months ago (1 children)

It's a good idea to invest time into hosting all your stuff in individual containers. You get lots of benefits that way, on top of isolation.

[–] witten@lemmy.world 1 points 11 months ago

Totally. Preachin' to the choir here. :D

[–] tko@tkohhh.social 2 points 11 months ago (1 children)

If I'm being honest, I've never even looked to see what language most of the stuff I run is written in. Out of 16 apps that I'm running, only 3 are accessible from outside my LAN. Those three are high-profile open source projects that are actively maintained. That's enough for me to be comfortable security-wise in my environment.

[–] witten@lemmy.world 1 points 11 months ago