From bare metal to a personal cloud — how this homelab came to be
A first look behind the scenes: why a single N150 host, why GitOps, and what comes next.
Welcome to the blog. Here I gradually document the decisions, pitfalls and small tricks from building this homelab.
Why self-host at all?
Fewer subscriptions, full data sovereignty and a huge learning effect. Instead of spreading photos, files and passwords across several providers, everything here runs on my own hardware — behind a single central login.
One host, many services
The heart is a low-power Intel N150 server running Unraid. Docker containers for the services, one KVM VM for Home Assistant, a dedicated NAS for the bulk data. Small, quiet, built for 24/7.
GitOps instead of SSH tinkering
Every change is a commit in Forgejo. A webhook nudges Dockhand, which redeploys the stack automatically. This blog post, by the way, came about the same way: write Markdown, commit, done.
More about the data flow is on the GitOps page.
Until the next post!