Home Server & Lab
A server rack at home that runs the services I rely on every day. Home Assistant for automation, Pi-hole for DNS, TrueNAS for storage, Docker Compose apps behind a Traefik reverse proxy, and a GitOps flow that reconciles the whole rack from a Git repo.
I wanted a place to host my own services and to explore all the open source projects out there. Self-hosting forces you to understand the whole stack (networking, storage, containers, security), and it has taught me a great deal.
Structure
I spread my services across a few machines. Networking runs on a UniFi Dream Machine SE. The critical everyday services (Home Assistant, Pi-hole, Traefik, Dockhand and so on) sit on a couple of Raspberry Pis to keep power consumption, heat and noise low. More demanding services like TrueNAS and media streaming run on my main server, which uses Proxmox as its host operating system.
Containerisation with Docker
I run most of my services with Docker Compose, for the simple reason that it is easy to understand and maintain. It also pairs well with the Dockhand instance that manages them all. I did try moving to a Kubernetes cluster, but with so few nodes and no real need for redundancy or load balancing, the added complexity and maintenance were not worth it. Still a good lesson to have tried it.
GitOps & CI/CD
Dockhand manages my Docker services through Git, which makes the repo the single source of truth. When anything changes there, it redeploys the affected service automatically. I also run Renovate, which watches for new image versions and opens a pull request whenever one is available.
Home Assistant automations
Lights, plugs and sensors all tie into Home Assistant, which lets me track usage and build smart automations around them. The goal is to keep expanding until the whole house is smart, with Home Assistant as the brain!
