this post was submitted on 26 Nov 2025
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How should I properly document my homelab? (sopuli.xyz)
submitted 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) by enchantedgoldapple@sopuli.xyz to c/selfhosted@lemmy.world
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Reading earlier comments in this community made me consider documenting the workings of my homelab to some extent, ie. docker configuration, credentials, ports and links of my services. I've tried to make it consistent and organised but it still feels half baked and insufficient. Everyone suggests documenting everything you do in your homelab but don't state how. Since I've hardly had experience running my own server, I would really appreciate observing the blueprint of some other fellow selfhoster for copying or taking inspiration from rather than considering documentation to be 'left as an exercise for the reader'.

Edit: I already have a note-taking solution with me. What I wish to ask is to know what needs to be documented and what the structure of the documentation should be to accommodate the information.

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[–] chrash0@lemmy.world 2 points 7 months ago

three, maybe four things:

  1. as mentioned: Obsidian. i pay for Sync cuz i like the product and want them to succeed and want reliable offsite backups and conflict resolution. use a ton of links and tags. i’ve been into using DataView to make tables of IoT devices, services, todo items, etc based on tags and other YAML frontmatter.
  2. chezmoi. manages my dotfiles so my machines are consistent. i have scripts that are heavily commented that show how to access MQTT, how to read and parse logs from journald, how to inspect my network, etc. i do think of them as code as documentation, even if they’re also just convenient.
  3. NixOS. this has been my code as config as documentation silver bullet. i use it as a replacement for Docker, k8s, Ansible, etc as it contains definitions for my machines and all the services and configuration they run, including any package dependencies and user configurations. no more statting an assortment of files to figure out the state of the system. it’s in flake.nix
  4. honorable mention to git and whatever git hosting provider is not on your network. track your work over time, and you’ll thank yourself when things go wrong.

some things are resistant to documentation and have a lot of stateful components (HomeAssitant is my biggest problem child from an infra perspective), but mainly being in that graph mindset of “how would i find a path here if i forgot where this was” helps a lot