Homelab - Part 5: Reset, Renovate, Rebuild January 13, 2022 on Jonathan's Blog Tags: homelab, devops, self-hosting, ansible, k8s

Checkout my homelab GitOps here: https://github.com/Jonnobrow/coffee-shop

Since my previous post not a great deal has changed in my homelab. I have been busy with work and had some other projects that have interested me more.

Here is a quick rundown of what I have added/changed since part 4.

Reset

I wiped out a bunch of services that I wasn’t using and now just have my core, daily use services:

• Nextcloud¹: File storage and photo ingress for me and my partner
• PhotoPrism²: Photo management and sharing
• Paperless³: Document Manager
• Mealie⁴: Recipe Manager and Meal Planner
• Jellyfin⁵: Media System
• I also have a bunch of utilities and background services

Renovate

I now self-host renovate and have a bot user dedicated to operating that.

The rationale behind self-hosting was to learn more about the bot rather than using the Github action in which I would only have had to do the repository specific config rather than the bot config. I also wanted to learn more about cron jobs in k8s.

Rebuild

I went back to the roots of why I started a homelab and made space for learning again.

A lot of my services were barely being used and had run their course in terms of teachable moments. They went in the bin and will hopefully get replaced with new things, some possiblities are:

• Dendrite⁶: A matrix homeserver
• Drone⁷: A CI/CD server
• Gitea⁸: A git server
• Vault⁹: A secrets management tool