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Homelab Organization

Hi all!

So I want to get back into self hosting, but every time I have stopped is because I have lack of documentation to fix things that break. So I pose a question, how do you all go about keeping your setup documented? What programs do you use?

I have leaning towards open source software, so things like OneNote, or anything Microsoft are out of the question.

Edit: I didn't want to add another post and annoy people, but had another inquiry:

What ReverseProxy do you use? I plan to run a bunch of services from docker, and would like to be able to reserve an IP:Port to something like service.mylocaldomain.lan

I already have Unbound setup on my PiHole, so I have the ability to set DNS records internally.

Bonus points if whatever ReverseProxy setup can accomplish SSL cert automation.

zelifcam ,
@zelifcam@lemmy.world avatar

OPNSense router handles auto SSL certificate renewals, Unbound (DNS) and HA Proxy ( for reverse proxy ).

Gitea instance for all of my docker-compose configs and documentation.

Joplin server and Joplin clients for easy notes available on all my devices.

slazer2au ,

Traefik for reverse proxy. Tag your container with the route and let traefik take over.

Hellmo_Luciferrari OP ,

I think Traefik is going to be what I investigate using. However the last time I tried, I was a little lost. I will have to comb over the documentation better this time.

earth_walker ,
@earth_walker@lemmy.world avatar

Traefik is powerful and versatile but has a steep learning curve. It also uses code to control its configuration which is a bonus for reliability and documentation as discussed elsewhere ITT. Nginx proxy manager is much simpler and easier to use, may be a good one to get started with, but lacks the advantages of traefik described above. Nginx proxy manager does support SSL cert automation.

slazer2au ,

Jim's garage has some videos on it.

gkpy ,

i recently made the switch from doing k3s+flux to have everything in code with bundlewrap and anemos/makeimg

K3can ,
@K3can@lemmy.radio avatar

I have a couple Libre Office files where I document the non-technical stuff for my own quick reference, like network layout in Draw, or IP and port assignments in Calc. I use a git repo to store and organize podman scripts, systemd unit files, configs, etc. Probably not the most elegant solution, but it's simple and FOSS.

Reverse proxy is Nginx Proxy Manager.

CloseSymbol ,

One day, I moved all services I really wanted from a couple of random VPS to a nice little proxmox machine at home (and then added some more services, of course). That was the day I swore to document stuff better, and I'm pretty satisfied with how well I was able to keep up with that.

In the proxmox web interface, you can leave notes per container. I note down which service the container is running including a link to the service's web interface if applicable, plus the source, and a note about how it auto-updates (green check mark emoji) or if it requires manual updates (handiman emoji).

Further I made a concious effort to document everything into a gollum wiki running on that proxmox host (exposes a wiki like web interface, stores all entries as plaintext .md files into a local git repo - very "portable"). Most importantly, it also includes a page of easy to understand emergency measures in case I die or become unresponsive, which I regularly print out and put into a folder with other important documents. The page contains a QR code linking to itself on the wiki too in case the printed version might be outdated here or there.

The organization of the wiki itself (what goes into which folder) is a bit of a work in progress, but as it offers full text search, that's not too much of a problem imo.

HumanPerson ,

I use nginx for reverse proxy. You can get certbot working to automate ssl fairly easily. There is a learning curve, but most services I use have documentation for hosting their stuff with it.

peregus ,

I use BookStack and with Node Red I export to PDF the books as soon as pages get updated, so if everything goes feet up, I have all the documentation in PDFs (locally and automatically uploaded to a free DropBox account, still done with Node Red).

Hellmo_Luciferrari OP ,

I may have to check out BookStack. I dig the looks of it.

hendrik , (edited )

I've been using YunoHost for some time. Cosmos seems good, too. Both do most of the stuff for you and should come with documentation. I think that's the way to go if you can't set it all up yourself, or lack time to maintain it.

I've also used Docker containers and plain Debian. I use NGinx as a reverse proxy.

I document things in text files (markdown). At some point it'd like to upload them with something like mkdocs or to a wiki. But since it's just me, having them just sitting in a directory on my laptop is fine.

Use something that's super accessible so you'll actually use it. I often just dump random thoughts or commands I executed into the textfiles and I have my text editor open all the time anyways. And then on the server I eiter use Ctrl+R and search through the shell history, or search in my documents. Doesn't need to be fancy, grep -rni "keyword" does it for me.

Decronym Bot , (edited )

Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:

Fewer Letters More Letters
DNS Domain Name Service/System
Git Popular version control system, primarily for code
HA Home Assistant automation software
~ High Availability
HTTP Hypertext Transfer Protocol, the Web
IP Internet Protocol
SSH Secure Shell for remote terminal access
SSL Secure Sockets Layer, for transparent encryption
VPS Virtual Private Server (opposed to shared hosting)
nginx Popular HTTP server

8 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 8 acronyms.

[Thread for this sub, first seen 2nd Jul 2024, 16:15]
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root ,
@root@lemmy.world avatar

StandardNotes for me

AllYourSmurf ,

Right now, I’m using Obsidian. I think I’d like to transition to keeping docs in a wiki, but I worry that it’s part of the self-hosted infrastructure. In other words, if the wiki’s down, I no longer have the docs that I need to repair the wiki.

Hellmo_Luciferrari OP ,

I have looked at Obsidian, it looks nice, but the closed source part is why I can't personally use it. Though, from discussions I have seen Logseq be thrown out when talking about similar software.

The wiki idea is a good one. The way to handle that is to have the wiki backed up incrementally.

fangleone2526 ,

I'm writing documentation in obsidian. I then expose it to the web so I can access from all my devices and share to others with quartz. Everything is markdown. It's tunneled out of my network with cloudflare tunnels, which do handle SSL for me.

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