First Steps

I try to follow GitOps and treat all infrastructure as code, this Homelab uses a combination of Packer VM templates, OpenTofu for provisioning VM’s, Docker for running everything, Ansible for running playbooks on all hosts at once, and Actions for automating repeated tasks. That being said this is a mixed repository for various sorts of purposes and thus there is no easy way to get started. This is not a project that can be easily copy/pasted and am only posting this for the philosophies and techniques used in a Homelab.

The first thing to do would be to install tools. Here are install instructions for services used:

Docker

The Docker install script I run on my hosts is:

curl -fsSL https://get.docker.com | sudo sh

This installs Docker Engine (v2) along with Docker Compose

Ansible

For Ubuntu:

sudo apt update
sudo apt install software-properties-common
sudo add-apt-repository --yes --update ppa:ansible/ansible
sudo apt install ansible

OpenTofu

For Ubuntu:

# Download the installer script:
curl --proto '=https' --tlsv1.2 -fsSL https://get.opentofu.org/install-opentofu.sh -o install-opentofu.sh
# Alternatively: wget --secure-protocol=TLSv1_2 --https-only https://get.opentofu.org/install-opentofu.sh -O install-opentofu.sh

# Give it execution permissions:
chmod +x install-opentofu.sh

# Please inspect the downloaded script

# Run the installer:
./install-opentofu.sh --install-method deb

# Remove the installer:
rm -f install-opentofu.sh

Packer

For Ubuntu;

curl -fsSL https://apt.releases.hashicorp.com/gpg | sudo apt-key add -

sudo apt-add-repository "deb [arch=amd64] https://apt.releases.hashicorp.com $(lsb_release -cs) main"

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install packer

VCS

You can use Github as this is the easiest way of getting started, however in the self-hosted nature of this Homelab I have chosen to use Forgejo and host my VCS system myself. There are few drawbacks to using this, such as Actions not being an exact 1to1 of Github Actions

See the FAQ for why Forgejo is used as opposed to Gitlab or Gitea.

Install instructions for Forgejo are here

Loki (logs)

A great video to get setup with Loki is available here