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.

  • @vegetaaaaaaaEnglish
    3•1 year ago

    You can full well deploy docker stacks using ansible. This is what I used to do for rocket.chat: [1] [2] (ditched it for Matrix/element without Docker, but the concept stays valid)

    I’m not to the point where the specifics of every system is in Ansible yet.

    What I suggest is writing a playbook that list the roles attached to your servers, even if the roles actually do nothing:

    # playbook.yml
- hosts: myhomeserver.example.org
  roles:
    - debian-base
    - docker
    - application-x
    - service-y

- hosts: mydevserver.example.org
    - debian-base
    - application-z

    # roles/application-x/tasks/main.yml
- name: setup application-x
  debug:
    msg: "TODO This will one day deploy application-x. For now the setup is entirely manual and documented in roles/application-x/README.md"

    # roles/application-x/tasks/main.yml
- name: setup service-y
  debug:
    msg: "TODO This will one day deploy service-y. For now the setup is entirely manual and documented in roles/service-y/README.md"

#...

    This is a good start for a config management/automated deployment system. At least you will have an inventory of hosts and what’s running on them. Work your way from there, over time progressively convert your manual install/configuration steps to automated procedures. There are a few steps that even I didn’t automate (like configuring LDAP authentication for Nextcloud), but they are documented in the relevant role README [3]