(04) — Environment
Homelab
A self-hosted infrastructure environment. Not a product—the place where I learn deployment, networking and monitoring by having to operate them.
Homelab — project cover
(02) — Why run one
Deployment stops being a final step once you are the person who has to fix it at 11pm.
Hardware at home running Linux and containerised services behind a reverse proxy.
Hosting things I use and giving projects somewhere real to run before they become anyone else’s problem.
(03) — What it runs
Docker and Compose as the default unit of deployment.
Nginx in front of internal services, with TLS at the edge.
Cloudflare routing instead of exposing the network directly.
Internal tools and experiments run here before or alongside public deployment.
Enough visibility to know what broke—currently the weakest part.
(04) — What it taught me
Most of what I know about backups, DNS, certificates and failure modes came from breaking this and having to bring it back.
The first FlowPress version was hosted here. Operating it showed me why the critical path eventually needed to move on-site.