I have been thinking about building a home lab for myself for a few months and finally bought a Raspberry Pi 4 (8 GB—model B) this week, inspired by Thorsten Ball and this little conversation. My goal is to experiment and also selfhost few things myself.

OS

First things first, I installed Raspbian Lite OS without desktop since that might be a overhead and not worth it for my requirements.

Thanks again Thorsten!

Tailscale

I installed tailscale to create a secure network via which homelab can be accessed. Few other features I’ve to look into:

• Tailnet lock
• Tailscale funnels (for public facing services)

DNS

I already own the domain manosriram.com, so i just created an A record pointing *.manosriram.com to the tailscale IP. This points all subdomains to the tailscale IP (port 80).

And then added an SSL certificate via NPM

For all proxy hosts, we can now just select the added SSL certificate and it creates the SSL certificate for that subdomain.

Docker

All services except tailscale are running inside containers using docker and docker-compose. Tailscale is a separate daemon running outside docker.

NPM (Nginx Proxy Manager)

nginx-proxy-manager:
    image: 'jc21/nginx-proxy-manager:latest'
    restart: unless-stopped
    container_name: nginxproxymanager
    ports:
      - '80:80'
      - '81:81'
      - '443:443'
    volumes:
      - ./data:/data
      - ./letsencrypt:/etc/letsencrypt
    networks:
      - proxy-network

This runs at default port 80, so *.manosriram.com reaches this service first. NPM is used to assign address to a subdomain and most importantly, and TLS for all *.manosriram.com sub-domains.

dufs

To share files, I used dufs. It is a lightweight file server written in Rust. This comes in handy when I want to refer to some files between machines. Instead of mounting the whole filesystem, I created a directory separately for dufs and then mounted it.

dufs:
    image: sigoden/dufs
    container_name: dufs
    network_mode: host
    volumes:
      - /home/manosriram/apps/dufs_shared:/data
    ports:
      - 5232:5000
    command: /data -A

Other services

I have similarly hosted few other services as well:

• Vaultwarden (password manager)
• Jellyfin (media manager)
• Heimdall (dashboard to view all services)
• dufs (file system)
• Memos (note taking application)
• Slash (url shortener - not sure if I’ll keep using this)
• Uptime Kuma (service monitoring tool to check the status of each application)

• #others