What tool do you use to display your self-hosting infrastructure
What tool do you use to display your self-hosting infrastructure
Hey, I have to „draw“ or make notes of my selfhosting stuff. It runs so smooth that I sometimes really forget where a service is running or how to reach the web-Interface.
For sure I have a password- and link-manager, but I would like another independent note with the structure of my selfhosting.
Usually I use Joplin. Is there a plugin that shows me a kind of a map?
Or are there other apps - maybe wikis - that do it much easier/better than that?
How do you document your selfhosting?
Everything is deployed via ansible - including nameservices. So I already have the description of my infra in ansible, and rest is just a matter of writing scripts to pull it in a more readable form, and maybe add a few comment labels that also get extracted for easily forgettable admin URLs.
19That sounds to complicate for me. I am still a beginner.
3You should definitely figure out some infra as code system now while it's manageable. Normally I'd recommend docker-compose as it's very easy to learn and has a huge ecosystem, but since you're using proxmox you might need to look at ansible like the other commenter said. Having IaC with git makes it so much easier to test new stuff, roll changes back, and all that good stuff, in addition to solving your original problem of forgetting what is running where.
Just find the simplest IaC solution possible. Unless you are gunning for a job in infrastructure you don't need to go into kubernetes or terraform or anything like that, you just need something reproducible that you can easily understand and modify.
5
Self documenting systems ftw.
1
If I have to draw diagrams, I use D2 https://d2lang.com/
It's a very simple to use code to diagram language.
It has plugins for vscode and obsidian.
It's open source that you can run locally, with the exception of their proprietary visualization engine. But I don't use that one, just use ELK.
11I’ve used https://draw.io (apparently https://app.diagrams.net/ now) before for this exact purpose. I mapped out network, devices, and services.
11And you can self host it!
7Just make sure to always be careful with recursion.
4
Great tool for documenting your setup. I use this at work a lot
4
Zabbix or Cacti are nice ways to draw maps that also serve a functional role in keeping track of the activity and alerting.
9This looks great! I will try Zabbix first! More than I expected. Thank you
3
I kinda just hold it all in my head and fix stuff when I notice it's broken.
8My stuff is all in docker-compose with a stack/service structure, so listing it is as simple as running
tree, and reading the individual YAML files if I need in-depth details.7KISS ! That's the way I'm doing it. Although it kinda gets more difficult to keep track of every docker image update after you have a dozen containers.
Thinking of something that could keep track and give me a nice notification about the changes and give a link to the github page before updating the container.
4Watchtower may be what you’re looking for.
8
I use self-hosted draw.io together with the Draw.io Nextcloud integration for a diagram, and Wiki.js to write down some important information. If you prefer something lighter, check out DokuWiki. There are many other options for a Wiki like Bookstack or django-wiki.
5you mentioned you've used joplin. All my notes are in markdown and I've been using Obsidian instead. Obsidian includes support for mermaid and can render (relatively simple) flowcharts.
https://obsidian.md/ https://mermaid.js.org/syntax/flowchart.html
5I like draw.io for process diagrams.
4Draw.io is also totally open and is able to be integrated into many different tools - so chances are your tool of choice already has a plug in for it. For example, nextcloud does.
3You can even self-host it and use it with Nextcloud.
1
I use Netbox. It’s built by the team at Digital Ocean for managing their infrastructure. It can run in a docker container for easy management and compatibility. You can use as few or as many features as you need. There are a lot of native features and if there’s something missing you can extend functionality with plugins. I use the plugin netbox-topology-views to visualize my physical and logical network maps. This may be overkill for most home labs or home networks.
4I use Cockpit to manage my system and containers and Dashy as a browser dashboard. It's similar to Heimdall but more minimal.
I also run Otterwiki and I'm planning on documenting my setup, but I haven't got around to it yet.
4I've seen some dashboards around, is this what you're looking for?
4I used to use ansible and helm, but it is overkill for my case. Today I basically use a combo of markdown and bash scripts, the combination of them allows me to run the scripts straight from my IDE.
3- 3
Hmmm, I have a few dockers, but most stuff is running in lxc‘s (Proxmox). Btw: I tried Heimdall (or Homar?) but I had to enter all services by hand. Is there a way or an app to automate that?
4Is there a way or an app to automate that?
Sadly, not to my knowledge. It's an app-by-app process. I could see an Ansible play or similar potentially fulfilling such a role, but I'm not aware of any existing projects.
1
I’m using self hosted wiki.js and draw.io. Works a treat, and trivial to backup with everything in Postgres.
3I will use that for documenting further stuff. If Zabbix works a few screenshots from there should explain a lot but everything else I would add to the wiki.
2I've written my wiki so that, if I end up shuffling off this mortal coil, my wife can give access to one of my brothers and they can help her by unpicking all the smart home stuff.
2
I'm coding them down as plantuml network code and render them using a selfhosted plantuml Server.
In the end my whole admin guide resides in a obsidian notebook as markdown There is even a plugin that renders plantuml code within obsidian
The nice thing: everything is just code and can be moved to any other tool (had my documentation in a local gitlab repo, but I swapped gitlab out for gitea)
3I still use Dia Diagram Editor for most things. I just wish it was still being updated.
2There's no forgetting where I have something hosted. If I ssh to service.domain.tld I'm on the right server. My services are all in docker compose. All in a ~/docker/service folder, that contains all the volumes for the service. If there's anything that needed doing, like setting up a docker network or adding a user in the cli, I have a readme file in the service's root directory. If I need to remember literally anything about the server or service, there's an appropriately named text file in the directory I would be in when I need to remember it.
If you just want a diagram or something, there are plenty of services online that will generate one in ASCII for you so you can make yourself a nice "network topology" readme to drop in your servers' home directory.
2This is the approach I try to also follow. It also makes the process of restoration from the backups or migrating to different server much easier.
1Yeah, and I assume future me will be even dumber than present day me, so I try to make it really easy for him to find out what he needs to know.
Another good tip is to put timestamps and increase the length of your bash history. That way when I log in half a year from now I'll know what I was up to.
2
Excalidraw in combination with wikijs, both self hosted of course thru portainer.
2A frontpage with links to all services and a monitoring app like Monitoror to allow me to check what's running.
1Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:
Fewer Letters More Letters Git Popular version control system, primarily for code NAS Network-Attached Storage NFS Network File System, a Unix-based file-sharing protocol known for performance and efficiency k8s Kubernetes container management package
4 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 15 acronyms.
[Thread #826 for this sub, first seen 23rd Jun 2024, 09:05] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]
1This is an intersting thread because I read through the lines the concerns that many have about losing parts of their homelab. Something I too am concerned about. While I have learnt to put my data securely on NAS with docker compose (I.e. docker image runs on VM while data i s stored on NAS and nas dataset is mounted via NFS on VM), in still not clear ho I save the config on the docker container. Basicalky, if I want to move that docker image to a new VM, how do I go about it?
1As long as you have your config files and whatever data from the app (both should be mapped from the container to the host), just copy it to the new system and start your container.
I have all my config files on my nas, but too many of my apps run off dbs so I need to figure out a way to backup the local database folder so I can have the actual data on my nas as well as just the configs.
2