Selfhosted

Here’s my approach to documentation. It’s about habits as much as it’s about actually writing anything down:

1. Never setup anything important via naked terminal commands that you will forget you did

2. Always wrap important commands in some kind of “setup-xyz.sh” script and then run that script to see if your install worked.

3. If you need to make a change to your service, ensure you update your script and so it can be re-run without braking anything

Get into the habit of this and you are documenting as you go

I don't, and I know that I'm fucked one day.

Every time I set up anything, I do one of two things:

• If it's container based, it gets a commented docker compose file in my custom orchestration

• If it's on a host system, the changes are scripted and commented in a setup script, which are run on new machines. If the acrit is specific to one machine, it is configured as such

I find in-setup docs to be best for a home lab, plus if I have to replace hardware, it's fast.

Fun fact, I do it for laptops and desktops, too.

I am fortunate enough to only manage a homelab and not an enterprise sized network. So I don't document anything just like at work.

Jokes aside, I do keep some harder to remember stuff written down in a README.md in my repo, but mainly most things are undocumented

I use the notes sections in proxmox preeettty heavily. Lots of links to the helper scripts, youtube videos and other resources i used to get er' goin'.

In the near future I'm really hoping I can set up Netbox to help me document the network and equipment I'm putting in my homelab. a nice thing is that I went through a divorce a while ago and I'm getting to start from scratch. You'd be surprised at just how much you've learned since starting to self host and I think there's this sunk cost fallacy that gets a lot of us to keep going with what we've got already set up because we've "already put so much work into it" and the concern of what we might lose by scrapping it and starting over.

Also, not what you asked... but if you're still relatively new with proxmox you should check out the ProxmoxVE helper scripts. Lots of good automated scripts from doing a post-install to setting up various LXC containers and VM's

I download the YouTube tutorials I followed, upload them to my UAT Jellyfin server, and then when my server is having issues I can't get to the videos!

A flawless system really

Lol.

The whole deployment is done via ansible, so the ansible source is my documentation.

I just set up everything via ansible and comment everything religiously, I've gotten to the point where I have playbooks for my laptop and desktop so if I have do do a clean install I just have to run the playbook and everything is set up and installed to my liking

It's annoying to go to my playbook to make changes and rerun it every time I want to install or remove anything from my daily PCs, but it pays off when I migrate computers or for some reason have to do a clean install

And for high level stuff and things not in ansible I keep a tiddlywiki since no matter how catastrophic the failure of my systems I can always find a way to access an HTML file for my own reference

In gitlab.

In the terraform project that builds it. Or in the cinc.sh config that makes it go.

MD lets me add diagrams.

I build my infrastructure with the terraform, Ansible and helm charts. The code is it's own documentation as well as comments in that code explaining why I've done things if it's not obvious.

I keep a very rudimentary README.md with some basic info on the services I run. I should probably set up a personal wiki to keep track of everything better

Perhaps more importantly, I also maintain a document with all the scheduled tasks that run, including what it is, how it’s defined, when it runs, and what device runs it. Really helpful for making sure cron jobs don’t run during a backup script or something

95% of my homelab lives on a single server, and everything I do is within containers. So, my documentation is just keeping all my compose files in a git repo and writing in comments when necessary. It’s fairly self-documenting, and I haven’t found the need to break out of just using containers for everything, besides a couple things like setting up mergerfs or cockpit, but that’s all plug and play nowadays with stuff like https://projectucore.io/

Of course, I don’t have any other things set up in my physical layout or network stack… but all that stuff would probably just go into an entry in my notes (obsidian/wiki.vim).

I have NixOS running on mine and I write everything in comments in my configuration.nix. Usually I'll write notes about why I set a certain option above the line where I do it but I also have a section at the start that describes anything to be aware of if I'm moving this configuration to another machine. For example “This assumes a drive is mounted on /mnt/backup0”

I generally just make notes in Obsidian, mostly about switch ports, VLANs, IP assignments and that kind of thing.

Also try to save snippets of commands or config edits I needed to get something obtuse working in case I need to do it again later.

I just created a note in Obsidian with the Excalidraw plugin.

A combination of Logseq (what, why, how) and KeePass for IPs and passwords (obviously)... I use the heirarchy in Keepass to show a device and then the services on it and then their configs, ie

• Hypervisor1
  • VM1
    • root user details
    • that webUI details
  • VM2 (Etc)

I used to do Visio drawings, but they were always out of date.

I refused to do any documentation for a long time because it made me feel stupid for not memorizing it. I learned it the hard way... Now I document everything possible with Git and Readmes.

It's really a wild growth over the years. My current approach is twofold. Netbox to manage devices/VMs and associated info with service deployments using Ansible. You can use the info from Netbox as an Ansible inventory directly.

Previously I tried network diagrams (too low detail) and spreadsheets (terrible to modify) to document machines. And for serviced I'd have an install page on my wiki (apologies, the codeblocks are somewhat broken atm)

I'm curious how everyone documents their core/critical configs to allow the non-technical in our homes work with it if needed. For instance if I'm on work travel and the Pi-hole goes down for whatever reason my wife wouldn't be able to use pretty much anything online. I can remote in and fix it but that could be hours/a day or two later. Same then for the proxmox stack that everything runs on.

Along the same lines, how are folks documenting for EOL? It may not be a happy thought but we are all going to go someday, so what is your plan and how have you ensured loved ones can access/save important data?

I have it in a git repo, broken down by the nodes and vps names. In each of these folders is a mixture of Ansible playbooks, docker compose or just markdown files with the descriptions. Some is random stuff - my VPS allows the export of the cloud firewalls as JSON for instance. All the secrets needed by Ansible are in an Ansible vault, the rest in KeePass.

I just try to make everything as self documented as possible. Eg. no stray scripts, everything is either implemented in other software (eg. my main wireguard peer in systemd-networkd, without any non-obvious external dependencies) or tracked as a part of an arch pkg with a simple PKGBUILD. I usually either have very simple nets (eg. my VPN's net only consists of four peers, in the order main - secondary - laptop - phone) or leave it to DHCP and SLAAC. I try to avoid using ports for local servers as much as possible and use unix sockets. Stuff like LVM/Luks pretty much documents itself.

I use different things:

• Netbox for the actual hard "inventory" like documentation. What cable goes where, what powers what, what MAC is assigned to what, when did I buy this or that?(The later with an addon). In theory I also have snipe-it,but doing it all in netplan is more convenient.

• Wiki.js for the concept and How-To-Side. Lots of draw.io diagrams (which can be done directly in articles), HOWTOs as a reminder for me, naming conventions, etc. Also some basic inventory information for disaster recovery. (Wiki.js is not hosted locally)

• Vaultwarden for all secrets,passwords, recovery keys, ssh keys,etc.

• Gitea for the most important config files/scripts/docker compose files.

• And last but not least I do backups to Mdisc Blue Rays every few months. These include the documentation, the most important files (knx project for example), etc. and are stored at a different location (bank safe). There is also an detailled explanation in both my wifes and my own will how to access these so if something happens the kiddos or someone taking care of them can gain access.

Secrets go in Keepass.

For server configs, a LibreOffice Writer file per machine (except for RPs, I only have one for those), written as a didactic manual explaining how to install and configure everything (I work on bare metal still). I started that way since diving into self-hosting was also a way to learn Linux, Sys-Admin and web-hosting. I don't do anything without updating the relevant chapters, or creating new ones. Not gonna lie: it's tedious. But also a life-saver, and the rationals for my choices remain available years later, which is priceless in many ways.

Once upon a time I had neat network gear running, and I mostly YOLO-ed the doc for those, relying instead on the firmware/config backups. I had to put those devices away, but when I finally get to play with them again, I'm going to suffer re-learning and re-discovering everything.

Recently, I got to hack and old console, and just did a chronological log-file with actions taken and URLs to guides, instead of writing down everything myself. It got me thinking I might add a simple log-file to track my actions, on top of my usual guides.

Or not. Having a life is nice too 😅

The Ansible playbooks I use to deploy it are the documentation.

I am the note taking king probably. I worked in the construction industry for 20 years. The rule was, 'if you didn't write it down, it didn't happen.' That has just carried over to every other aspect of my life including selfhosting. Whenever I sit down to my terminal to do anything, I open Notepad++ and a regular windows notepad session. The windows notepad session is a little script I came up with that opens windows notepad with 1000 empty lines. It's one of the many quirks I have, but I hate having to hit the enter key to start a new line. I like to be able to click on a new line for a new line of thought and start typing.

@echo off
(for /l %%i in (1,1,1000) do echo.) > empty_lines.txt
start notepad empty_lines.txt

(Save as a bat link on desktop)

Anyways, the Notepad ++ session is for after things get worked out, I make an official entry into the Notepad++. The windows notepad session is just a scratch pad or 'thinking paper' from which I transfer to the Notepad ++ doc. Convoluted, no? LOL You asked, and I just pulled back the curtain for you a bit. Careful what you ask for, could stain your brain.

I try to document everything. I feel like, if I'm going to take the time to learn something, I might as well write it down. I take my Grok sessions and distill them down if I found the info relevant. I also do all of this because after my TBI which gave me a seizure condition as well as other mental/neuro issues, my memory is shit, even for someone of my age bracket. But I can stand up a server and secure it, just from my notes in a step by step manner conducive to my limited mental acuity. I've often wondered if anyone would be interested in my notes, like maybe some newcomer to selfhosting wouldn't have to reinvent the wheel since I have a penchant for fucking things up.

I've moved to an "infrastructure as code" approach, not using any fancy tools in particular, primarily just bash shell scripts. Basically almost everything I setup or do gets documented via shell scripts, I write them as I go when I'm learning to install something new, and before I commit to something to new, I take extra care to make sure the scripts are idempotent so that when I want to do make any changes, all I need to do is add it to the appropriate script and re-run it.

The idempotent part takes some effort sometimes, but is not actually as hard as it seems, particularly if you don't mind that it sometimes spends some wasted time doing things that have already been done, and occasionally spits out some harmless error messages because something is already done, but I also try to minimize that when I can. The consequences of doing too much by re-running are rarely serious. Yeah sometimes the scripts can break, but as long as they fail properly (set -euo pipefail) it's usually pretty obvious how to fix it and it won't leave too much of a mess.

Doing this has transformed my homelab from a mess of unknowable higgledy-piggledy spaghetti-services that was always teetering one small failure away from total collapse and frantic rebuilding, into something repeatable and reproducible that I can actually ... wait for it ... test. Just firing up a Linux ISO in a VM is all I need to test everything I'm doing in a perfect sandbox, and I can throw it away when I'm done with no regrets. Plus it makes rolling out new servers, and more importantly, decommissioning old ones, a breeze, you know exactly what's on them and how it was set up, because it was all in your scripts. Combined with good data backups (which are also set up in the scripts) and restores (which I also test with scripts) it really takes the drama and stress out of migrations and even hardware failures.

Yeah there are probably easier ways to accomplish what I'm doing using some of the technologies like terraform, ansible and nix/flake that people have mentioned, and I've dabbled with those, but for me, the shell script approach strikes a nice balance of not just documenting but also learning the process myself so that I understand enough of what it's doing to effectively debug it when something goes wrong, and it works on almost everything and in most cases requires no installation or setup. Bash is everywhere. I even have an infrastructure-as-code setup for my Steam Deck to install stuff and get it set up the way I want.

I had that same problem, then I saw some YouTube videos where the guy recommended using Ansible to do stuff and it's been night and day, not only it's reproducible so if I ever want to move a service to another machine all I have to do is move a couple of roles around and possibly copy stuff over to keep the data but also it acts as documentation, because if I ever forget something I can look at the code.

Also I decided to write the roles myself instead of relying on pre-existing ones, so there's some logic to how my stuff gets deployed and it's easy to extend for any new stuff I want to add.

🧠 + a few slapdash notes in a password manager. It's very organic, very human.

Occasionally leads to situations like this.