HomeLab
Status: Maintained
I run this private cloud end to end, from the hypervisor to the login page. Most machines sit in my apartment; a few are rented hosts elsewhere. The design does not care which is which.
What holds it up?
Storage is the part that must never be interesting. One pool holds the data I want to keep, with snapshots and regular scrubs; the virtual machines above it are replaceable. The one indulgence is a Windows VM that boots straight from the pool and streams games around the apartment.
Proxmox · TrueNAS · ZFS
How does anything get in?
Public traffic comes in through a tunnel, without inbound port forwarding. A reverse proxy routes requests, and shared authentication handles sign-in for the services behind it. When I am away, a private mesh brings me home.
pfSense · Cloudflared · Traefik · Authentik · Tailscale · AdGuard Home
What lives on it?
The life that would otherwise be scattered across subscriptions: notes and their history, scanned and searchable paper documents, private code, photos, film and audiobooks, and the apartment itself, automated. These give me self-hosted alternatives to services I would otherwise rent.
Anytype · Paperless-ngx · Gitea · Immich · Plex · Tautulli · Audiobookshelf · Seerr · Home Assistant · Proton Bridge · SFTPGo · The Lounge
Where do the models run?
Local models run on a GPU at home, alongside tools for speech recognition and synthesis. Model gateways connect the external providers I use, and MCP servers I built let assistants interact with homelab services.
Ollama · Open WebUI · Whisper · Chatterbox · LiteLLM · Bifrost · MCP servers
Who keeps it alive?
Monitoring covers service metrics and disk health. Unhealthy containers restart automatically, and updates arrive as pull requests. Automated workflows triage routine failures and send reports, leaving me the problems that need a closer look.
Prometheus · Grafana · Uptime Kuma · Beszel · Dozzle · Scrutiny · Deunhealth · Portainer · Renovate · n8n
Making the storage, networking, and services work together is what makes it a cloud. It leaves room for the part I enjoy most: breaking things it can survive.