Category: homelab

  • NGINX Proxy Manager

    I’ve mentioned using NGINX as an interface between the internet and a service a while ago. This works by all incoming traffic coming to NGINX, and NGINX determining which service that traffic should go (from the NGINX config files) then acting as a middleman. This functionality is generally referred to as a ‘reverse proxy’. This…

  • Due Diligence on a Docker Image

    I need a survey tool, and a quick search turned up LimeSurvey, there’s a ‘community edition’ so naturally I plan to self-host it. I scrolled down to the ‘installation’ section of the manual which has a big list of PHP dependencies. Ain’t nobody got the time for that in 2024, I scroll further looking for…

  • My Web App Update Process

    I’ve settled on a very standard, reproducible setup for services in my homelab. This post looks at that, then runs through the update I did today to Forgejo which only took a few minutes and felt relatively risk free. Standard Setups My system is based around Proxmox. I have three physical machines – one for…

  • Deploying a Node app in Docker

    When I wrote the install instructions for mdserver (little Markdown server Node app) on it’s github page it was something like: Which is great if you know how to do those things (they are bread and butter to a web dev) but not if you’re a self-hoster who just wants a web server that converts…

  • Hosting Your Own Docker Registry

    The Docker Personal (ie free tier) plan currently allows one private repository, but even if you want to pay for the next level where you can have unlimited repositories, you may still want to host your own private registry – it’s going to be quicker inside your network, and you won’t run up against Docker’s…

  • Fly.io, Uptime Kuma & scraping a status page

    I’ve been aware since I set up Uptime Kuma for my monitoring, that having an instance on my local network monitoring my VPS websites wasn’t ideal. The main reason being that the flakiest part of my infrastructure is my 4G home internet, so if that goes down I have no website monitoring, and even if…

  • What’s unfinished in your Udemy?

    If you work or study in tech, I always feel a good getting-to-know-you question is “what courses or tutorials did you start, but not finish?” My Udemy doesn’t look too bad: The ZTM course was good, but I got stuck on an AI API exercise. I think it’s a common sticking point for students since…

  • Using LXC templates in Proxmox

    I wrote a couple of weeks ago about a standard workflow I use to spin up a web service in an LXC container to add to my self-hosted collection of services. It went a bit like: do this, and then this, then this other thing. Whenever you find yourself repeating a set of steps like…

  • Practice your restore strategy

    My homelab set up is a production node, (pve-prod1) a backup production node (pve-prod2) and a development machine (pve-dev1). They are all G2 800 minis, but pve-prod1 has a i7 6700T and 32GB RAM, where as the other two are i5 6500T with 16GB. My thinking is that the older two can easily share the…

  • Gogs, Gitea, Forgejo

    I’ve been really pleased with Gogs – it’s lightweight, was simple to spin up, and has worked perfectly. But then this morning on Mastodon, there’s a post from @Codeberg.org describing a security vulnerability in their Git hosting project Forgejo. This issue also apparently affects Gitea and Gogs – what’s up with that? I actually already…