Building a Home Lab That Actually Runs Itself

I've been meaning to write this up for a while. This isn't a polished guide — it's more of a brain dump of what I actually did, what broke, and what I'd do differently.

The Hardware

Picked up a second-hand HP EliteDesk mini PC. Quad-core i5, 16GB RAM, 512GB SSD. Nothing special. The goal was low power draw and silent operation. It lives in my spare room and I genuinely forget it's on most of the time.

Running Proxmox on bare metal, which lets me spin up VMs or LXC containers for different workloads. LXCs are great for simple services — lighter than VMs, fast to create, easy to snapshot.

Docker Compose Is the Right Choice Here

I spent a while deciding between running services directly in LXCs vs containerising everything with Docker. Ended up going with Docker Compose inside a Debian LXC, and it's been solid.

The main benefit: docker-compose.yml is documentation. I can look at it six months later and immediately understand what's running and why.

services:
  nextcloud:
    image: nextcloud:latest
    restart: unless-stopped
    volumes:
      - ./data/nextcloud:/var/www/html
    environment:
      - POSTGRES_HOST=db
      - POSTGRES_DB=nextcloud
    depends_on:
      - db

  db:
    image: postgres:16-alpine
    restart: unless-stopped
    volumes:
      - ./data/postgres:/var/lib/postgresql/data
    environment:
      - POSTGRES_PASSWORD=${POSTGRES_PASSWORD}

The restart: unless-stopped on everything means services come back up automatically after a reboot without needing me to intervene.

Nextcloud

File sync, calendar, contacts. I was using Dropbox for years and the main motivation was just to stop paying for cloud storage. Nextcloud does everything I need and the mobile apps are decent.

The setup wasn't difficult but there were a few gotchas:

• Trusted domains — you need to explicitly add your domain (and IP) to trusted_domains in config.php, or every request gets rejected.
• Background jobs — set these to cron, not AJAX. The default AJAX approach runs jobs only when someone opens the web interface, which is useless for a server you mostly access via apps.
• Redis for locking — without this, Nextcloud uses file locking which can cause problems under load. Adding Redis as a service took five minutes.

Tailscale — The Part That Changed Everything

This is the bit I'd recommend to anyone running a home lab. Tailscale gives you a private WireGuard mesh network. Every device I own — laptop, phone, work machine — is on a private subnet. I can access my Nextcloud instance from anywhere without opening any ports to the internet.

# Install on the server
curl -fsSL https://tailscale.com/install.sh | sh
sudo tailscale up

# On any other device
sudo tailscale up

That's it. No port forwarding, no dynamic DNS, no nginx reverse proxy exposed to the internet. The Tailscale daemon handles NAT traversal.

I also enabled Tailscale's subnet routing so devices on my home network that don't have Tailscale installed (smart home stuff, the printer) are still reachable from anywhere.

What's Actually Running

• Nextcloud — file sync, calendar, contacts
• Vaultwarden — self-hosted Bitwarden-compatible password manager
• Uptime Kuma — simple status monitoring, sends me a push notification if anything goes down
• Watchtower — auto-updates Docker images (pinned to weekly, not continuous)
• Portainer — web UI for Docker, mostly useful when I'm on a device without SSH access

What I'd Do Differently

Volumes. I was lazy initially and let Docker manage volumes, which meant backups were a pain. Everything's now mapped to explicit paths on the host so I can just rsync the whole data/ directory to an external drive.

Also: write down your environment variables somewhere sensible. I use a password manager entry for each service's env file. Sounds obvious, but I've rebuilt things from scratch because I lost the config.

The Boring Bit That Matters

I run daily backups to an external drive using a simple cron job:

0 3 * * * rsync -av /opt/homelab/data/ /mnt/backup/homelab/

Nothing clever. It runs at 3am, takes about two minutes, and I've restored from it twice. The backup that never gets tested isn't a backup.

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The whole thing costs me about £2/month in electricity. Every service I'm paying for that I've replaced with something self-hosted has paid for the hardware three times over at this point.