Thanks for sharing. And what about hardware. What do you use as hardware?
After playing around with several tools, I settled on the following:
Bitcoin Core - https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin
Fulcrum - https://github.com/cculianu/Fulcrum
Mempool.space - https://github.com/mempool/mempool
Alby Hub - https://github.com/getAlby/hub
This gives me the bare minimum (node, electrum server, blockchain explorer, and lightning node).
I had a full LND node running for a while but managing it became a pain, so I shut it down and went with Alby Hub instead.
Discussion
Raspberry Pi 4 with a usb3 ssd attached. The new Pi 5s have better support for NVME drives, so you don’t need the external drive anymore. I haven’t felt the need to update the hardware though - the 4 is powerful enough for personal use (I wouldn’t try running a public electrum server on it, but for private use it works fine)
How many gb ram and ssd disk?
8G ram and 480G SSD. I use a second 3T spinning drive to store the blocks since they don’t need to be on a fast drive - only the indexes and chainstate. The blocks folder is a symlink to the slower (and larger) drive.
This works because core doesn’t do random I/O on the blocks - they are written and read sequentially, so a regular hard drive works fine.