How do you efficiently document your self hosted journey?

That’s the neat part, you don’t

Just some scripts and config files in external git at the moment but usually I just get my refrence form other VMs. Probably going with obsidian or other markdown editor and upload notes to somewhere if disaster strikes.

Infrastructure as code

Infrastructure as code, the code that is your homelab should be the documentation of it.

https://silverbullet.md/ and I may start using https://d2lang.com/ too.

Mkdocs, grav

Logseq

I blog it. https://static.xtremeownage.com/

Obsidian with it's folders/files in a location that gets duplicated to another drive by rsync.

self hosted git repository.

I setup gitea on my server and use it to track version changes of all my scripts.

And I use a combination of the wiki and .md (readme) files for howto's and any inventory I'm keeping, like IP addresses, CPU assignments etc.

But mainly it's all in .md formatted with markdown.

Bookstack (/r/BookStack)

Poorly.

Document?

About 2 years ago I came to the conclusion that my personal documentation for tech stuff is non existent. Some excel sheet here, a saved TXT in c:\temp over there, the occasional "I still need tot rewrite and save this unsaved file in Notepad++" combined with a bunch of google keep notes.

I ended up installing Wordpress with https://basepresskb.com/docs/knowledge-base/basepress/
I use it for virtually everything. From documenting the build of a server to simply logging expensive household equipment with extended warranty.

I've got a file called "TODO server stuff.txt" with some notes from 2019, does that count?

I keep everything in my brain.

Has its perks.. no need to write things down.

But it's easy to momentarily forget the little things that come with, say, reinstalling everything.

I like writing docs in markdown, and using mkdocs with mkdocs-material for this. With a bit of trickery, you can do templating / transclusion, and you get a useful search too.

Zim wiki

Yeah I document everything… inside my brain

Knowledgebase + OIDplus + scripts/configs in git repo.

I chose local instance of Wordpress for my knowledgebase a decade ago. Today I'd probably use Bookstack.

TRILIUM. https://github.com/zadam/trilium Dig into it and check out all the examples before giving up on it. I've tried every note app I can imagine, and it's hands down the best.

I am even using the API to pull shopping lists from home assistant and add them to my todo list via node-red.

With tailscale and 24/7 access, I never have to worry about missing a thought. While working out this morning, I heard a new word in a song, took me 5 seconds to stop and document that. It's now my home for every thought, idea, plan, code snippet, recipe, home inventory, etc...

It's 100% my trusted system. I roll GTD concepts into it with @contexts and whatnot, so I've even combined all other knowledge management systems into trilium.

I can't recommend it enough.

I use Joplin for my wiki/documentation tool. I like that it supports markdown and can be exported as markdown if needed. Also the variety of plugins is a plus.

Bookstack, MediaWiki, Joplin. These are three ways that I'd recommend.

Bookstack is such an amazing tool. Just make a shelf for Homelab, books for each aspect like VMs, docker, etc. Then have a chapter for each VM or app and them pages can be installation, running, issues, troubleshooting, significant upgrades, etc. It's important to actually take note of it all and not just grab URLs for your resources because if those pages are removed then you're screwed.

a notepad++ doc with links to a millon guides I used, end result urls and login info.

How about just writing Ansible playbook/s?