Roguedbear

Roguedbear

It ain’t much, but its honest work 💁‍♂️

Having the ability to host your own apps is amazing isn’t it?
I was able to repurpose my spare laptop and turned it into a Homelab with Docker & docker-compose

Introduction

When i got my new laptop, I didn’t want to turn off my old machine forever. Running some experiments by hosting a minecraft server for my friends, and configuring port forwarding in my router sparked an idea that I really don’t have to turn off my old laptop. I could still use it as my secondary machine and have a “unique” setup.

And thus, began my homelab journey (which is still, an on-going one) 🌠

For simplicity’s sake, I assume you already have Docker & docker-compose installed on your machine or else you can follow along from the official docs

I also assume that you have SSH access on your machine and have changed the config to “best practise” security settings (like disabling password authentication, root ssh login etc) and installed fail2ban to avoid brute force login attempts

Basic Setup

Portainer

First-off, I’d like you to install and setup Portainer. Portainer Community Edition specifically.

Portainer allows you to manage your Docker containers with nice a user friendly GUI. I’ve noticed the GUI helps me a lot tracking changes of what’s been happening when debugging/developing docker images or a container stack

Installation

The official docs install portainer via docker CLI commands. I’ve converted those to a docker-compose yaml since I find it easier to upgrade containers to a newer versions with a simple command rather than going to the docs and follow the process all over again.

  • The compose file

    The follow is the compose file that you can save it in a folder named portainer/ maybe.

    # docker-compose.yml
version: "3.9"

services:
  portainer:
    container_name: portainer
    restart: always
    image: cr.portainer.io/portainer/portainer-ce:2.9.3
    volumes:
      - /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock
      - ./portainer_data:/data
    ports:
      - 8000:8000
      - 9000:9000
      - 9443:9443

    Now you can run $ docker-compose up -d in the current directory.

    A new folder portainer_data is created in the directory where the docker-compose.yml file is located

  • First time setup

    Now you can go <your machine's IP>:9000 and see the login portal for portainer

    portainer login page
    portainer login page

Now you can follow along the instructions at the page to change your credentials something other than default

Grafana-Prometheus-Node-exporter Stack

One more “stack” of apps that i love is the Grafana stack. This stack composes of the following apps:

To explain in short,
Node Exporter is an app which exports almost all stats about the machine (like CPU Temps, RAM usage, storage usage and all other statistics) in a format that is “scrape-able” by Prometheus.

Prometheus is a time-series database that stores these scraped data, puts them in its database waiting to be queried

Grafana is a dashboard visualisation tool that periodically queries the Prometheus database (PS: not just limited to Prometheus, can add almost any database as a data source) and displays those metrics in nice beautiful graphs ✨

My Grafana Dashboard
This is how my Grafana dashboard looks like

Installation

  • The compose file

    This is the docker compose file that I’m using. (I’ve also left some performance tweaks I’ve made after researching through node-exporter’s github issues page to make it consume less CPU resources.)

    networks:
  monitoring:
    driver: bridge
services:
  node-exporter:
    image: prom/node-exporter:latest
    container_name: node-exporter
    restart: unless-stopped
    volumes:
      - /proc:/host/proc:ro
      - /sys:/host/sys:ro
      - /:/rootfs:ro
    command:
      - "--path.procfs=/host/proc"
      - "--path.rootfs=/rootfs"
      - "--path.sysfs=/host/sys"
      - "--collector.filesystem.mount-points-exclude=^/(sys|proc|dev|host|etc)($$|/)"
    expose:
      - 9100
    networks:
      - monitoring

  prometheus:
    image: prom/prometheus:latest
    container_name: prometheus
    ports:
      - 9090:9090
    command:
      - --config.file=/etc/prometheus/prometheus.yml
    volumes:
      - ./prometheus.yml:/etc/prometheus/prometheus.yml:ro
    depends_on:
      - cadvisor
      - node-exporter
    networks:
      - monitoring

  grafana:
    container_name: grafanaa
    image: grafana/grafana:latest
    volumes:
      - ./grafana_storage:/var/lib/grafana
    ports:
      - 3000:3000
    networks:
      - monitoring

  • Prometheus config file

    Before running this setup, you also need to create a new file in the same directory as prometheus.yml. This is a configuration file used by prometheus. It includes the configuration of how often should it scrape the data exporters and where are the data sources

    scrape_configs:
  - job_name: node
    scrape_interval: 5s
    static_configs:
      - targets: ["node-exporter:9100"]

    Now you can run docker-compose up -d go to grafana on port 3000 and setup your dashboards from there.
    Node-exporter and prometheus would automatically start collecting system statistics almost like plug-n-play

As of now, I’ve covered only 4 of the applications I use. In future I would really like to add here how i set up all these services behind a reverse proxy and hosting some optional discord bots (via docker ofcourse ;)) for my friends’ server.
Either that or you can go on your own googling through the countless personal blogs written by other homelab enthusiasts or hop onto r/SelfHosted or r/HomeLab

Conclusion

This is just the beginning of the self-hosted homelabbing journey. You could add some hard drives, configure them into RAID mode and you have yourself a mini NAS for your home network. You can run Home Assistant to control almost all of your IoT devices at home without the need of Google or Amazon.

The possibilities are endless, all thanks to the easy Docker & docker-compose deployment of ephemeral containers

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