Homelab Fun

Been having some fun building out a homelab. As a person who enjoys software development and experimentation in my free time I find it useful to have a playground in the home for testing various software deployments.

The first step was installing a custom firmware on my home router. The factory stuff is lacking many features for genuine networking experimentation. Rather than trying to set up a lot of core network infrastructure on my own, I wanted a powerful base of customizable routing, firewall and virtual networking features without having to handroll these fundamental bits I'm not particularly interested in.

The second step was acquisition of low-cost "server." My local university has a robust hardware cycling and liquidation program administered through the GovDeals website. For less than $100 I was able to acquire a capable used SFF desktop that could reliably host several containerized apps running on linux.

After the installtion of linux I set up Dockge to allow me to easily manage docker compose stacks through a web interface. This provides the dynamic server infrastrcuture. The first docker compose stack I added was Nginx Proxy Manager, which with the additon of setting up a wildcard SSL certificate through Let's Encrypt and configuring DNS on the router, I now had a robust setup for creating, naming, and securely accessing locally-hosted services.

I'll get more into the hosted services in a second post. But one of the early ones was a self-hosted Gitea instance. This lets me host project code locally, and set up github-like actions on the repos. This website is a relatively simple SSG project, and so this post is my first attempt at automatic deployment using the gitea actions.

Hopefully streamlining the process will lead to an increase in posting frequency.