Timo's Homelab

Features • Get Started • Documentation

This project utilizes Infrastructure as Code and GitOps to automate provisioning, operating, and updating self-hosted services in my homelab. It can be used as a highly customizable framework to build your own homelab.

What is a homelab?

Homelab is a laboratory at home where you can self-host, experiment with new technologies, practice for certifications, and so on. For more information about homelab in general, see the r/homelab introduction.

Overview

Project status: ALPHA

This project is still in the experimental stage, and I don't use anything critical on it. Expect breaking changes that may require a complete redeployment. A proper upgrade path is planned for the stable release. More information can be found in the roadmap below.

Hardware

• 4 × NEC SFF PC-MK26ECZDR (Japanese version of the ThinkCentre M700):
  • CPU: Intel Core i5-6600T @ 2.70GHz
  • RAM: 16GB
  • SSD: 128GB
• TP-Link TL-SG108 switch:
  • Ports: 8
  • Speed: 1000Mbps

Features

• Common applications: Gitea, Seafile, Jellyfin...
• Automated bare metal provisioning with PXE boot
• Automated Kubernetes installation and management
• Installing and managing applications using GitOps
• Automatic rolling upgrade for OS and Kubernetes
• Automatically update apps (with approval)
• Modular architecture, easy to add or remove features/components
• Automated certificate management
• Automatically update DNS records for exposed services
• VPN without port forwarding
• Expose services to the internet securely with Cloudflare Tunnel
• CI/CD platform
• Private container registry
• Distributed storage
• Support multiple environments (dev, prod)
• Monitoring and alerting 🚧
• Automated offsite backups 🚧
• Single sign-on 🚧
• Infrastructure testing

Some demo videos and screenshots are shown here. They can't capture all the project's features, but they are sufficient to get a concept of it.

Demo
Deploy with a single command (after updating the configuration files)
PXE boot
Homepage with Ingress discovery powered by Hajimari
Monitoring dashboard powered by Grafana
Git server powered by Gitea
Matrix chat server
Continuous integration with Tekton
Continuous deployment with ArgoCD
Cluster management using Lens
Secret management with Vault

Tech stack

Logo	Name	Description
	Ansible	Automate bare metal provisioning and configuration
	ArgoCD	GitOps tool built to deploy applications to Kubernetes
	cert-manager	Cloud native certificate management
	Cloudflare	DNS and Tunnel
	Docker	Ephemeral PXE server and convenient tools container
	ExternalDNS	Synchronizes exposed Kubernetes Services and Ingresses with DNS providers
	Fedora Server	Base OS for Kubernetes nodes
	Gitea	Self-hosted Git service
	Grafana	Operational dashboards
	Helm	The package manager for Kubernetes
	K3s	Lightweight distribution of Kubernetes
	Kubernetes	Container-orchestration system, the backbone of this project
	Loki	Log aggregation system
	Longhorn	Cloud native distributed block storage for Kubernetes
	MetalLB	Bare metal load-balancer for Kubernetes
	NGINX	Kubernetes Ingress Controller
	Prometheus	Systems monitoring and alerting toolkit
	Renovate	Automatically update dependencies
	Tekton	Cloud native solution for building CI/CD systems
	Vault	Secrets and encryption management system
	ZeroTier	VPN without port forwarding

Get Started

• Try it out locally without any hardware (just 4 commands!)
• Deploy on real hardware for production workload

Roadmap

See roadmap and open issues for a list of proposed features and known issues.

Contributing

Any contributions you make are greatly appreciated.

Please see contributing guide for more information.

License

Copyright © 2020 - 2022 Khue Doan

Distributed under the GPLv3 License. See license page or LICENSE.md file for more information.

Acknowledgements

References:

• Ephemeral PXE server inspired by Minimal First Machine in the DC
• ArgoCD usage and monitoring configuration in locmai/humble
• README template
• Run the same Cloudflare Tunnel across many cloudflared processes
• MAC address environment variable in GRUB config
• Official k3s systemd service file
• Official Cloudflare Tunnel examples
• Initialize GitOps repository on Gitea and integrate with Tekton by RedHat
• SSO configuration from xUnholy/k8s-gitops
• Pre-commit config from k8s-at-home/flux-cluster-template
• Diátaxis technical documentation framework
• Official Terratest examples

Here is a list of the contributors who have helped to improve this project. Big shout-out to them!

• @locmai
• @MatthewJohn
• @karpfediem
• @linhng98
• @BlueHatbRit
• @dotdiego
• @Crimrose
• @eventi
• @Bourne-ID
• @akwan
• @trangmaiq

If you feel you're missing from this list, feel free to add yourself in a PR.

Stargazers over time