---
title: "My introduction to a self-hosted homelab"
layout: post
date: 2025.12.15
---

This project was a result of really good timing, as well as the right tools coming together.

## Motivations

The self-hosting experiment started with [Jellyfin](https://jellyfin.com), an open source
media server for movies and TV shows. Using [Tailscale](https://tailscale.com), I connected
my Jellyfin instance into my own personal tailnet. I originally used AWS, but moved to
Hetzner after realizing additional block storage was half the price (!!!) there.

Meanwhile, I had built a tiny monitoring service for [Interchange](https://interchange.bchen.dev) to notify
me if the server went down. Putting this up on a PaaS (I used Heroku originally)
ran me the same amount as a dedicated Hetzner server which could run many
other things at once. This was not something that needed 24/7 uptime, either.

Finally, I was also using [Actual](https://actualbudget.org), a budgeting app, originally
hosted on PikaPods. At some point, I realized that putting all of these services (Jellyfin, Actual, Interchange monitoring)
on one server would be a dream come true for my wallet.

## My setup

For those unfamiliar with Tailscale, it's a private mesh VPN that uses peer-to-peer instead of
a centralized server. This means that if I connect my server to my own private network (a "tailnet"),
I can access it from my other devices via a static Tailscale-assigned IP address.

Tailscale has some handy additional features which made it suitable for my personal setup.
Using [Tailscale Serve](https://tailscale.com/kb/1242/tailscale-serve), I could take any service mapped
to a port number and make that accessible by directly typing in a hostname.

One particular quirk of Tailscale is that you can connect a Docker container as its own
individual device, and the default Tailscale device limit is generous. Therefore, I decided
to run each service *as its own Docker Compose instance*. This way, I had separate hostnames
for each service, but in reality they were all running on the same bare metal.

![Screenshot of my different services running as Tailscale instances](/assets/2025-12-15-homelab/homelab.png)

## Takeaways and further experimentation

In the interest of automation, I'm currently experimenting with a GitHub Actions continuous
deployment pipeline which would let me push configuration changes directly from GitHub. It uses
Tailscale and plain old SSH.

I really, really hope to self-host more of what I use in the future. I'm interested in
[Fizzy](https://www.fizzy.do), a newly-launched Kanban software that is self-hostable,
as an alternative to GitHub Issues and Jira.
[Self-hosting a Git server](https://git-scm.com/book/en/v2/Git-on-the-Server-Getting-Git-on-a-Server) for
my personal "experimental" code is something I'm also interested in.

Eventually, I plan to self-host all my personal projects.