Ansible-based personal homelab setup.

Description

The project contains a set of ansible playbooks use to setup (and manage) a personal homelab infrastructure. The homelab runs on a Raspberry Pi 4 running on Debian.

Setup

1. Setup virtual environment using uv:

uv venv
source .venv/bin/activate

2. Install python dependencies (incl. ansible):

uv pip install -r requirement.txt

3. Use the make command runner to setup the homelab:

$ make
dry-run         Dry-run default playbook
ping            Ping all hosts
pre-commit      Run pre-commit on all files
run             Run default playbook run
vault-create    Create the secret vault file vault
vault           Edit the secret vault file vault

4. Add hosts into the hosts.ini file (example):

[homelab]
heimdall ansible_python_interpreter=/usr/libexec/platform-python

5. Modify group vars file group_vars/all/vars.yml

6. Create and edit vault secrets:

$ make vault-create

7. Run dry-run or run to deploy the infrastructure.

$ make dry-run

Hosted services

Server management

• homer - A very simple static homepage for your server.
• portainer.io - A centralized service delivery platform for containerized apps.
• Watchtower - A container-based solution for automating Docker container base image updates.
• Wireguard - Self-hosted VPN (optional: or use alternative service, e.g. (OpenVPN)) or Tailscale.
• healthchecks - A cron monitoring tool written in Python & Django.
• rdiff - Reverse differential backup tool, over a network or locally (or use similar ideas).

Monitoring

• Glances - An Eye on your system.
• Munin

Media

• plex media server - Organizes video, music and photos from personal media libraries.
• FreshRSS - A free, self-hostable RSS feed aggregator.

File storage & Sharing

• nextcloud - ☁️ cloud Nextcloud server, a safe home for all your data.
• photoprism - Photos App powered by Go and Google TensorFlow 🌈 ✨.
• vaultwarden - Alternative implementation of the Bitwarden server.

Automation

• home assistant - My self-hosting infrastructure, fully automated from empty disk to operating services.
• grocy - Grocy is a web-based self-hosted groceries & household management solution for your home.

Hardware / software stack

• Raspberry Pi 4 Model B 8GB: OKdo
• OS: Debian bookworm (12)
• Storage - (primary) Sandisk microSDXC 128GB (/, ext4)
• Storage - (data) ZFS pool ~40 TB (/mnt/store/)

References

Homelab / Self-hosted

• geerlingguy/ansible-for-devops - Ansible for DevOps examples.
• davestephens/ansible-nas - Build a full-featured home server or NAS replacement with an Ubuntu box and this playbook.
• notthebee/infra - IaC for my Linux/Unix machines
• awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted - A list of Free Software network services and web applications which can be hosted on your own servers
• khuedoan/homelab - Small and power efficient self-hosting infrastructure. Fully automated from empty disk to operating services
• abhilesh/self-hosted_docker_setups - A collection of my docker-compose files used to setup self-hosted services on Raspberry Pi 4 running 64-bit Raspberry Pi OS

Home automation / IOT

• HQarroum/awesome-iot - 🤖 A curated list of awesome Internet of Things projects and resources.
• pfalcon/awesome-smarthome - Curated list of awesome SmartHome/Home Automation things (open and leaving users in control)
• microsoft/IoT-For-Beginners - 12 Weeks, 24 Lessons, IoT for All!
• frenck/awesome-home-assistant - A curated list of amazingly awesome Home Assistant resources.
• Hypfer/Valetudo - Cloud-free control webinterface for vacuum robots