55 lines
2.8 KiB
Markdown
55 lines
2.8 KiB
Markdown
---
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title: "My introduction to a self-hosted homelab"
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layout: post
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date: 2025.12.15
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---
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This project was a result of really good timing, as well as the right tools coming together.
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## Motivations
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The self-hosting experiment started with [Jellyfin](https://jellyfin.com), an open source
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media server for movies and TV shows. Using [Tailscale](https://tailscale.com), I connected
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my Jellyfin instance into my own personal tailnet. I originally used AWS, but moved to
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Hetzner after realizing additional block storage was half the price (!!!) there.
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Meanwhile, I had built a tiny monitoring service for [Interchange](https://interchange.bchen.dev) to notify
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me if the server went down. Putting this up on a PaaS (I used Heroku originally)
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ran me the same amount as a dedicated Hetzner server which could run many
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other things at once. This was not something that needed 24/7 uptime, either.
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Finally, I was also using [Actual](https://actualbudget.org), a budgeting app, originally
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hosted on PikaPods. At some point, I realized that putting all of these services (Jellyfin, Actual, Interchange monitoring)
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on one server would be a dream come true for my wallet.
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## My setup
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For those unfamiliar with Tailscale, it's a private mesh VPN that uses peer-to-peer instead of
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a centralized server. This means that if I connect my server to my own private network (a "tailnet"),
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I can access it from my other devices via a static Tailscale-assigned IP address.
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Tailscale has some handy additional features which made it suitable for my personal setup.
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Using [Tailscale Serve](https://tailscale.com/kb/1242/tailscale-serve), I could take any service mapped
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to a port number and make that accessible by directly typing in a hostname.
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One particular quirk of Tailscale is that you can connect a Docker container as its own
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individual device, and the default Tailscale device limit is generous. Therefore, I decided
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to run each service *as its own Docker Compose instance*. This way, I had separate hostnames
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for each service, but in reality they were all running on the same bare metal.
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## Takeaways and further experimentation
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In the interest of automation, I'm currently experimenting with a GitHub Actions continuous
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deployment pipeline which would let me push configuration changes directly from GitHub. It uses
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Tailscale and plain old SSH.
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I really, really hope to self-host more of what I use in the future. I'm interested in
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[Fizzy](https://www.fizzy.do), a newly-launched Kanban software that is self-hostable,
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as an alternative to GitHub Issues and Jira.
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[Self-hosting a Git server](https://git-scm.com/book/en/v2/Git-on-the-Server-Getting-Git-on-a-Server) for
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my personal "experimental" code is something I'm also interested in.
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Eventually, I plan to self-host all my personal projects.
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