Features • Get Started • Documentation

This project utilizes Infrastructure as Code and GitOps approaches 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.

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.

• 6 × Lenovo ThinkCentre M700:

  • CPU: Intel Core i5-6600T @ 2.70GHz
  • RAM: 16GB DDR4
  • SSD: 1TB

• 1 x Unifi CloudKey Gen2+ (All Unifi software removed; base image and OS replaced with Debian Bookworm - Re-purposed as a bastion host for cluster initialization and management):

  • CPU: Octa-core Arm® Cortex®-A53 @2.2GHz
  • RAM: 3GB LPDDR3
  • SSD: 512GB
  • eMMC: 32GB
  • microSD: 64GB

• 1 x Custom NAS (Network Attached Storage):

  • CPU: Intel Xeon E5-2699 v4 @ 2.20GHz
  • Motherboard: MSI X99A SLI PLUS
  • RAM: 128GB DDR4
  • HBA: LSI 9305-16i
  • Network:
    • 1 × X520-DA1 10GbE via SFP+ (Data Plane)
    • 1 × I218-V 1GbE (Management Plane)
  • SSD: 13TB (6.7TB usable via RAID10)
    • 13 × 1TB TEAMGROUP m2 SATA SSDs
  • HDD: 100TB (80TB usable)
    • 4 × 20TB Seagate Exos X22
    • 1 × 20TB Western Digital Red Plus (Parity)
  • GPU:
    • 1 x NVIDIA GeForce GTX 2060 12GB VRAM
    • 1 x NVIDIA GeForce GTX 2060 6GB VRAM

• 2 x qemu/kvm virtual machines (VMs) - Created and managed via Terraform in metal/virtual/
  • CPU: 6 vCPU (host-passthrough)
  • RAM: 16GB
  • HDD: 1TB
  • GPU: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 2060

Virtualization is done using KVM with Libvirt and QEMU. The virtual machines are provisioned and managed as Infrastructure as Code using Terraform with the Libvirt provider on top of the NAS hardware.

• Common applications: Gitea, Seafile, Jellyfin, Paperless...
• 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

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
	Docker Registry	Private container registry
	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
	Nix	Convenient development shell
	Prometheus	Systems monitoring and alerting toolkit
	Renovate	Automatically update dependencies
	Tekton	Cloud native solution for building CI/CD systems
	ZeroTier	VPN without port forwarding

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

See roadmap and open issues from the original repo for a list of proposed features and known issues.

Any contributions you make are greatly appreciated.

Please see contributing guide for more information.

Copyright © 2020 - 2025 Lauren Lajas - Based on khuedoan/homelab

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

Based on work originating from khuedoan/homelab - Buy him a coffee!!