Homelab Update: The Paternity Leave Edition

It took 5 years, but I finally updated the jank of a homelab setup I had. All it took was paternity leave to create enough free time to finally knock it off the to-do list.

I was mostly in need of a repo cleanup and upgrading the backbone docker compose hosting most services.

Here’s a brief overview of the new things I found useful and fun.

Repo Cleanup and Improved Setup

The main thing here was cleaning up the house and making it easier to hack on in the future:

• Long overdue update to docker compose from 3.4 to 3.8
• Removed network mode from all services except Plex (which had issues)
• Dev and prod versions for testing out new things
• A central Makefile which acts as the backbone for most dev commands
• Automated container/service upgrades weekly

New Additions

Homepage

Homepage provides a nice landing page that links through to everything you’re hosting. Clean, functional, and exactly what I needed for organizing all my services.

Overseerr

Overseerr provides a nice media request UX that hooks up to the *arrs and Plex nicely. Also has Plex OAuth built in, which is convenient. My only complaint is that it’s quite slow in rendering - needs some kind of cache I’d guess.

Lazy Librarian

LazyLibrarian is kind of jank software, but I’ve yet to find something that’s as nice as the *arrs for managing and especially requesting ebooks. Readarr was seemingly the answer but it never got out of beta and recently was archived as a project. After a bit of jerry-rigging, I can now request a book from anywhere and it’ll show up on my Kindle (which I need to jailbreak once the latest firmware is cracked).

Cloudflare Tunnels

Cloudflare Tunnels make it mega easy to make self-hosted stuff securely accessible externally. The setup process is surprisingly straightforward and removes a lot of the complexity around exposing services safely.

Tailscale

Yes, like everyone else I think Tailscale is great.

Between Tailscale and Cloudflare Tunnels, everything I host is now accessible outside my network. If only I need access, it’s hooked up to Tailscale. If others need access (e.g., friends and family with access to Overseerr for requesting media) I have it accessible via Cloudflare tunnels with some kind of auth.

Bonus: Code on the Go with a-shell, SSH and Claude Code!

I added a-shell to my phone with some aliases to quickly SSH into my server, where I mostly use it to interact with Claude Code. Not a ton of times I’m on the go and want to code, but ngl it feels pretty cool when you do.

Removed Things

These friends said goodbye:

Ombi

Replaced by Overseerr - the UI is cleaner and the Plex integration works better.

Readarr

Project archived/on hiatus. Was never able to get it to work well anyway, so no big loss here.

The homelab is finally in a state where I’m not embarrassed to show it to other people. More importantly, it’s actually maintainable now. Sometimes all it takes is a few weeks of very expected and enjoyable free time to tackle that pile of side project that’s developed over years tech debt.

Also the kid is much cooler than anything on my homelab, so that’s a win too.