this post was submitted on 28 Jul 2023
136 points (95.3% liked)

Selfhosted

40359 readers
414 users here now

A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.

Rules:

  1. Be civil: we're here to support and learn from one another. Insults won't be tolerated. Flame wars are frowned upon.

  2. No spam posting.

  3. Posts have to be centered around self-hosting. There are other communities for discussing hardware or home computing. If it's not obvious why your post topic revolves around selfhosting, please include details to make it clear.

  4. Don't duplicate the full text of your blog or github here. Just post the link for folks to click.

  5. Submission headline should match the article title (don’t cherry-pick information from the title to fit your agenda).

  6. No trolling.

Resources:

Any issues on the community? Report it using the report flag.

Questions? DM the mods!

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
ruud@lemmy.world
Loki@lemmy.world
CannaVet@lemmy.world
devve@lemmy.world
HybridSarcasm@lemmy.world
HybridSarcasm@lemmy.hybridsarcasm.xyz
136
What do you use to document your home lab? (lemmy.procrastinati.org)
submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by SeeJayEmm@lemmy.procrastinati.org to c/selfhosted@lemmy.world
141 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

My home lab has a mild amount of complexity and I'd like practice some good habits about documenting it. Stuff like, what each system does, the OS, any notable software installed and, most importantly, any documentation around configuration or troubleshooting.

i.e. I have an internal SMTP relay that uses a letsencrypt SSL cert that I need to use the DNS challenge to renew. I've got the steps around that sitting in a Google Doc. I've got a couple more google docs like that.

I don't want to get super complicated but I'd like something a bit more structured than a folder full of google docs. I'd also like to pull it in-house.

Thanks

Edit: I appreciate all the feedback I've gotten on this post so far. There have been a lot of tools suggested and some great discussion about methods. This will probably be my weekend now.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] vegetaaaaaaa@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

You can full well deploy docker stacks using ansible. This is what I used to do for rocket.chat: [1] [2] (ditched it for Matrix/element without Docker, but the concept stays valid)

I’m not to the point where the specifics of every system is in Ansible yet.

What I suggest is writing a playbook that list the roles attached to your servers, even if the roles actually do nothing:

# playbook.yml
- hosts: myhomeserver.example.org
  roles:
    - debian-base
    - docker
    - application-x
    - service-y

- hosts: mydevserver.example.org
    - debian-base
    - application-z

# roles/application-x/tasks/main.yml
- name: setup application-x
  debug:
    msg: "TODO This will one day deploy application-x. For now the setup is entirely manual and documented in roles/application-x/README.md"

# roles/application-x/tasks/main.yml
- name: setup service-y
  debug:
    msg: "TODO This will one day deploy service-y. For now the setup is entirely manual and documented in roles/service-y/README.md"

#...

This is a good start for a config management/automated deployment system. At least you will have an inventory of hosts and what's running on them. Work your way from there, over time progressively convert your manual install/configuration steps to automated procedures. There are a few steps that even I didn't automate (like configuring LDAP authentication for Nextcloud), but they are documented in the relevant role README [3]

[–] SeeJayEmm@lemmy.procrastinati.org 2 points 1 year ago

That makes a lot of sense.