this post was submitted on 02 Apr 2026
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How do you document your setup? (piefed.social)
submitted 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) by BruisedMoose@piefed.social to c/selfhosted@lemmy.world
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Like soup-to-nuts. I know I need to document what I'm doing and I've started several times, but then I never go back and make updates. I don't know if it's just the ADHD or if I'm just going about it or thinking about it in the wrong way.

So I'm curious about:

  • what you use for your documentation
  • how you organize it
  • what information you include
  • how you work documentation into your changes/tinkering flow

Edit: Dang, folks! You all have given me a lot to read through, think about, and explore. Thank you!

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[–] hamsda@feddit.org 3 points 3 months ago

It depends on what it is. I do not have a singular documentation-platform or wiki for those things. I'm more of the keep the docs where the code is guy. I also try to keep complexity to a minimum.

All my linux server setups are done with ansible. ansible itself is pretty self-documenting, as you more or less declare the desired outcome in YAML form and ansible does the rest. This way, I do not need to remember it, but it's easier to understand when looking it up again.

Most of my projects have a git repository, so most of what I need to know or do is documented

  • in a README.md
  • as pipeline-instructions inside .gitlab-ci.yml

This way, I was able to reduce complexity and unify my homelab projects.

My current homelab-state is:

  • most projects are now docker-based
  • most projects have a GitLab CI for automated updating to newer versions
  • the CI itself is a project and all my CI-docker-based deploys use this unified pipeline-project
  • most projects can be tested locally before rolling out new versions to my VMs
  • some projects have a production and a staging server to test
  • those which cannot be dockerized or turned into a CI are tools and don't need that (e.g. ansible playbooks or my GitLab CI)

On what to include, I always try to think: Will I still be able to understand this without documentation if I forget about the project for 6 months and need to make a change then? If you can't be sure, put it in writing.

If it's just a small thing regarding not the project itself or the functionality or setup itself but rather something like I had to use this strange code-block here because of XXX, I'll just put a comment next to the code-line or code-block in question. These comments mostly also include a link to a bug-report if I found one, so i can later check and see if it's been fixed already.