Khue'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, 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 🚧

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	Ephermeral 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
	Trow	Private container registry
	Vault	Secrets and encryption management system
	ZeroTier	VPN without port forwarding