alt Hacker NewsI've tried for 15 years to have my homelab, but always get lost in the complexity after a year or so, in the past. About 3 years ago I gave NixOS a try instead for managing everything, which suddenly made everything easier (counter-intuitively perhaps) as now I can come back after months and still understand where everything is and how it works after just reading.
Setting up Forgejo + runners declaratively is probably ~100 lines in total, and doesn't matter I forget how it works, just have to spend five minutes reading to catch up after I come back in 6 months to change/fix something.
I think the trick to avoid getting tired of it is trying to just make it as simple as humanly possible. The less stuff you have, the easier it gets, at least that's intuitive :)
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Unless you actually need hardware (local LLM host, massive data transformation jobs), it is also easy to get into the many machines trap. A single old laptop, N97, optiplex, etc sitting in a corner is actually a huge amount of computer power that will rival most cloud offerings. Single machine can do so much.
Yup this is what I've got up and running recently and it's been awesome.
My setup is roughly the following.
- Dell optiplex mini running Proxmox for compute. Unraid NAS for storage.
- Debian VM on the Proxmox machine running Forgejo and Komodo for container management.
- Monorepo in Forgejo for the homelab infrastructure. This lets me give Claude access to just the monorepo on my local machine to help me build stuff out, without needing to give it direct access to any of my actual servers.
- Claude helps me build out deployment pipeline for VMs/containers in Forgejo actions, which looks like:
- Forgejo runner creates NixOS builds => Deploy VMs via Proxmox API => Deploy containers via Komodo API
- gateway for reverse-proxy & authentication
- monitoring with prometheus/loki/grafana stack
- general use applications
All of my docker compose files and nix configs live in the monorepo on Forgejo, so I can use Renovate to keep everything up to date.
Plan files, kanban board, and general documentation live adjacent to Nix and Docker configs in the monorepo, so Claude has all the context it needs to get things done.
I did this because I got tired of using Docker templates on Unraid. They were a great way to get started, but it's hard to pin container versions and still keep them up-to-date (Unraid relies heavily on the `latest` tag). Moving stuff over to this setup bit-by-bit and I've been really enjoying it so far.
Thanks. Yeah, I've probably been overcomplicating it before. I was running Kubernetes on Talos thinking that at least it would be familiar. Such power tools for running simple workloads on a single node is inviting headaches.
Maybe my needs are simpler. But I just made do with systemd services and apt (debian). I've also setup Incus for the occasional software testing and playing around. After using OpenBSD as a daily driver, I'm more keen with creating a native package for the OS/Distro than wrangling docker compose files.
Just to echo what others are saying: NixOS and Proxmox are the answer.
I run both right now, but I am in the process of just running NixOS on everything.
NixOS really is that good, particularly for homelabs. The module system and ability to share them across machines is really a superpower. You end up having a base config that all machines extend essentially. Same idea applies to users and groups.
One of the other big benefits, particularly for homelabs, is that your config is effectively self-documenting. Every quirk you discover is persisted in a source controlled file. Upgrades are self-documenting too: upstream module maintainers are pretty good about guiding you towards the new way to do things via option and module deprecation.