Homelab infrastructure
Self-hosted production environment, rebuilt from zero with infrastructure as code.
What it is
A dozen services running on hardware I own, treated with the same discipline as something I would be paged for. Proxmox underneath, Terraform describing the virtual machines, Ansible configuring them, Traefik terminating TLS and routing, Tailscale making the whole thing reachable without exposing anything to the open internet.
Why rebuild it from zero
The first version was built by hand over about two years, and it worked — right up until I needed to change something. Nothing was written down, so every change started with archaeology: reading config files to remember what past-me had decided and why.
The rebuild had one rule: if it is not in a repository, it does not exist. A machine that cannot be recreated from code is a machine I am afraid to touch, and a machine I am afraid to touch is one I stop maintaining.
What it buys
- Recreating any service is a command, not an afternoon.
- Certificates renew without me remembering they exist.
- Nothing is exposed publicly — access goes through Tailscale, so there is no port-forwarding rule to get wrong.
- Upgrades are testable. I can stand up a copy, break it, and throw it away.
What I would do differently
Backups came last, and they should have come first. There was a stretch where the infrastructure was reproducible but the data in it was not — which is the worst of both worlds, because it feels safe.