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While many people are familiar with the concepts of dev-ops (and if you aren't, Amazon has a pretty good definition), we often think of dev-ops in an enterprise context. For a home lab, there are quite a few applications for utilizing dev-ops concepts at home. For general dev-ops concepts I highly recommend taking a look at Techno Tim's content. Tim's content covers quite a few home lab topics and puts out almost weekly Youtube videos. For our purposes we are going to be utilizing Gitlab.com repos to orchestrate code and systems in our home lab!

Having a scripts for repeatable system administration saves times and reduces human errors. The following lines can be used in shell scripts (I tend to use bash) or in the cloud-init data of a cloud provider. I tend to have this script and the public key of an SSH key in a public Git repo that I just clone into a new VPS and execute. This should work on modern Debian and Red Hat Linux variants such as Ubuntu 22.02 and CentOS (RIP).

For the past few years I've been running my (mostly) inactive website via Gitlab pages, serving statically generated pages from Hugo. Static site generators like Hugo and Jekyll take markdown, join it with some images and CSS, convert it all to html, and there you have a website which can be served from just about anywhere. Small file sizes and no "moving parts" can result in a much faster and "secure" website. Of course there will always be security issues with the host, but you aren't serving content out of a database.

While this process worked for a while, especially since I don't put out much content, I wanted something a bit more interactive, not something as indepth as a Wordpress, but something a bit more involved. While I can deal with CSS, I don't want to. Enter Grav. Grav is a CMS like, Wordpress, but unlike Wordpress does't rely on a database component. All flat files.

Virtualization is an important tool for a homelab, large or small. For many years I ran some iteration of VMWare, normally ESXi with vCenter. Last year I switched everything from VMWare to Proxmox, a "free" hypervisor platform. In 2022 there are quite a few homelab hypervisor platforms that we could take advantage of.

Hypervisor Options

Homelabbers have plenty of options when it comes to running a hypervisor at home. If you are just getting started you might investigate something free like Oracle's Virtual Box, Microsoft's Hyper-V, or VMWare's Workstation Player. These products are often referred to as Type 2 hypervisors, or hypervisors that virtualize on top of an operating system. These products work well as they allow you to just install the hypervisor directly on your existing operating system, the cost to get started is quite low, if it isn't for you or you feel that you want to move onto more advanced hypervisors, worst case you just uninstall the hypervisor (or in the case of Hyper-V, just turn off the Windows feature).

Hypervisors like VMWare's ESXi and Proxmox Virtual Environment are known as Type 1 hypervisors, or hypervisors that are installed on bare metal. The benefit of Type 1 hypervisors is that they are more performant, designed to run as servers, and include more enterprise-like features.

I recently (Summer 2020) took some time to revisit, update, and document my homelab. This was also a great time to upgrade the primary hypervisor that I've been using since 2013, ~7 years ago.

New Hypervisor Parts

The parts used for this build are primarily new, but I reused the case and a few...