this post was submitted on 26 Nov 2025
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How should I properly document my homelab? (sopuli.xyz)
submitted 8 months ago* (last edited 8 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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[–] stratself 2 points 8 months ago

I write homelab docs mostly for user guidance like onboarding, login, and service-specific stuff. This helps me better design for people by putting myself in their shoes, and should act as a reference document for any member to come back to.

Previously I built an Mkdocs-Material website with a nice subdomain for it, but since the project went on maintenance mode, I'm gonna migrate all docs back to a Forgejo wiki since it's just Markdown anyways. I also run an issue tracker there, to manage the homelab's roadmaps and features since it's still evolving.

I find this approach benefiting compared to just documenting code. I'm not an IaC person yet, but I hope when I am, the playbooks should describe themselves for the nitty-gritty stuff anyways. I do write some infra notes for myself and perhaps to onboard maintainers, but most homelab developments happen in the issue tracker itself. The rest I try to keep it simple enough for an individual to understand