// the find
khuedoan/homelab
Fully automated homelab from empty disk to running services with a single command.
A fully automated homelab setup that takes bare metal machines from empty disk to a running Kubernetes cluster with GitOps, monitoring, SSO, and a dozen self-hosted apps — all triggered by a single make command. It's one person's real production homelab made into a reusable framework, not a tutorial project. Target audience is developers who want to run their own infrastructure and actually learn the stack rather than copy-paste configs.
- PXE boot automation via a Docker-based ephemeral server is genuinely clever — you don't need an existing network service to bootstrap new nodes, the server spins up, does its job, and disappears
- Clean separation between metal (Ansible), platform (Helm/ArgoCD), and apps layers makes it possible to swap components without rearchitecting everything
- Terratest-based integration tests for infrastructure are rare in homelab projects and show the author actually cares whether the thing works after changes
- Nix flake for the dev shell means contributors get a reproducible toolchain without installing 12 CLIs manually
- Still self-described as ALPHA with no upgrade path — if you adopt this, you're signing up for potential full redeployments on breaking changes, which is painful once you have real data in Paperless or Jellyfin
- Hardcoded to specific NEC/ThinkCentre hardware in the docs and inventory files; adapting to different hardware requires touching Ansible roles and PXE configs in non-obvious ways with minimal guidance on what to change
- Rook Ceph on 128GB SSDs shared with the OS is a recipe for storage headaches — Ceph wants dedicated disks and room to breathe, and the reference hardware doesn't leave much of either
- No secrets rotation story: External Secrets pulls from a store, but there's nothing handling key rotation or what happens when a secret is compromised — you're on your own once the initial setup is done