this post was submitted on 28 Jul 2023

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138

What do you use to document your home lab? (lemmy.procrastinati.org)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by SeeJayEmm@lemmy.procrastinati.org to c/selfhosted@lemmy.world

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My home lab has a mild amount of complexity and I'd like practice some good habits about documenting it. Stuff like, what each system does, the OS, any notable software installed and, most importantly, any documentation around configuration or troubleshooting.

i.e. I have an internal SMTP relay that uses a letsencrypt SSL cert that I need to use the DNS challenge to renew. I've got the steps around that sitting in a Google Doc. I've got a couple more google docs like that.

I don't want to get super complicated but I'd like something a bit more structured than a folder full of google docs. I'd also like to pull it in-house.

Thanks

Edit: I appreciate all the feedback I've gotten on this post so far. There have been a lot of tools suggested and some great discussion about methods. This will probably be my weekend now.

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[–] wildbus8979@sh.itjust.works 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Git based static site generator, like gohugo or Jekyll.

[–] erre@programming.dev 2 points 1 year ago

This is interesting. I already just keep a collection of markdown files.. might as well make it an internal documentation site so it's easier to browse 🤔

[–] ludw@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago

I'm using anytype.io, it's been pretty neat so far.

[–] grimer@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago

Any chance you wouldn't mind sharing the SSL renewal doc? Redacted of course. Mine is coming up and I'd like to do it correctly this time. :)

[–] happyhippo@feddit.it 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I have a git repo for it, needless to say. And so README.md plus a network diagram from https://app.diagrams.net/

[–] kurt_propane@lemm.ee 2 points 1 year ago (4 children)

Why not push it up to GitHub? Then you also get a commit history to see your changes overtime.

[–] SeeJayEmm@lemmy.procrastinati.org 1 points 1 year ago

Seems a lot of people are doing that.

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[–] Johnny5@lemm.ee 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I run a local MediaWiki appliance from turnkeylinux, super easy to spin up in proxmox.

[–] gobbling871@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago

Comments inside the docker-compose.yml files?

[–] rentar42@kbin.social 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I know that I would keep forgetting to update the docs, so my documentation are the ansible playbooks and docker-compose.yaml files that I use to set it all up.

That leaves anything that has to be done in some Ui undocumented, so I try to keep that to a minimum, which isn't always easy (I'm looking at you authentik!).

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[–] dr_robot@kbin.social 2 points 1 year ago (4 children)

I deploy as much as I possibly can via Ansible. Then the Ansible code serves as the documentation. I also keep the underlying OS the same on all machines to avoid different OS conventions. All my machines run Debian. The few things I cannot express in Ansible, such as network topology, I draw a diagram for in draw.io, but that's it.

Also, why not automate the certificate renewal with certbot? I have two reverse proxies and they renew their certificates themselves.

[–] ttk@feddit.de 1 points 1 year ago (4 children)

This is the way

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[–] markr@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I use bookstack. Simple selfhosted wiki.

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[–] antony@lemmy.ca 2 points 1 year ago

I use Ansible, Docker, and Emacs OrgMode files committed to Git. Diagrams are a mix of Miro and Graphviz. There's also a few markdowns in there too. Joplin is used for rough notes only.

[–] Kcg@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 year ago

Hackmd.io for simple markdown docs.

[–] pound_heap@lemm.ee 1 points 1 year ago

Some stuff is in Joplin, some stuff is in wiki.js. Joplin lacks organization features. Wiki.js stores stuff in database and has problems with search, both are possible to fix, I believe...

Occasionally I remember about problems with this setup, but I'm too lazy to fix or replace it

[–] some_guy@lemmy.sdf.org 1 points 1 year ago

I constructed a simple kbase for myself using Docbase. I love it.

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