Homeserver — how it came to be
A self-run homelab with 25+ containers and counting. Not because I have to — because I can, and the playground is too good.
Why this exists
Started with an old ThinkCentre, a Raspberry Pi, and the question "can I host Plex at home". Today 25+ containers — Home Assistant, Ollama, n8n, Gitea with its own CI/CD, Grafana/Prometheus/Loki, Authentik as SSO, Nginx Proxy Manager, plus the infrastructure for all my projects.
It's not economical. A cloud VM would be cheaper, faster to set up, less stress. But: I learn from it. Every tool I look at professionally I've already broken at home first.
Time invested
Grew over several years, never a block project. Some weeks 10 hours, some months nothing. Biggest phase was migrating from one-off Docker commands to Compose and then to structured stacks — that was a few weekends.
What worked
- Authentik as SSO across all services — log in once, everything open. Made life much simpler.
- Local Ollama saves me token costs for all hobby experiments — and LAN latency on small models is excellent.
- Own Gitea CI/CD means I don't count GitHub Actions minutes. Build pipelines can run as long as they want.
- The Grafana stack tells me when something breaks. More than once Loki has spotted a memory leak in a container before I did.
What didn't
- SSL certificate renewals were a recurring late-night pain until I moved to clean DNS-01 challenges.
- A power outage without a UPS once corrupted a Postgres instance. Backup strategy was the next exercise.
- The day Ollama ate 16 GB of RAM and the server effectively stalled. Resource limits are not a nice-to-have.
- Authentik updates broke my SSO configuration more than once. Pinned versions now, no "latest".
Where I am now
It runs. With everything that means in a homelab — so not always, but often enough. It's the playground that lets all my other projects exist in the first place.