Starting Over With the Pi Since Oct of last year, I haven’t had time to reinstate my self-hosted apps like Calibre, Miniflux, Navidrome, etc on my little Pi homelab. During this time, I missed using Navidrome the most (I resorted to listening only on my Mac); with the only thing running on it being Indiekit with Docker. Neater Installs But that changed yesterday! After chatting with a new sysadmin friend online, I got a huge surge of motivation to fix my home server to at least what I had before. My previous setup was pretty horrendous to be honest, I didn’t know any better, and the whole Pi was in a disarray of software installed either by: direct / bare metal via dietpi-software via Docker (using Portainer) Docker Management This time, I am setting up everything in containers with compose files. I am also dropping Portainer for just Lazydocker in the meantime. Portainer felt too heavy for me. TBH, I want to try using Dokploy but not sure if it’s an overkill doing beginner homelab things on my 8GB Pi (it only requires 2GB RAM and 30GB storage which my Pi meets). Arcane is also on my radar. I can’t find much on people using Dokploy with Raspberry Pis except for this post by Mariano (but they didn’t specify what spec Pi they have). They also run DietPi so that’s nice to know! Homelab Start Page My choice of dashboard will remain with Homer as I already had the config set and don’t want to waste time customizing. I still have about four more services I have to restore—but everything is going well so far. I now know how to use Caddy to manage the services with ports mapping to the individual containers and everything will be available within my Tailnet. When I tried working on this headless Pi project the first time, I didn’t know how to access the server outside from home. With Tailscale and Caddy this time round, I’m very happy to get access when I’m not home! Restoring Files on the Pi Back in the day, when I first started messing with the Pi 4B, I was hoping to transfer files directly via USB onto the USB SATA SSD boot drive from my Mac (my primary computer). But super newbie me didn’t realize that ext4 is not compatible on Macs. Rsync saves the day! With my much better Internet connection now (LAN directly from my Mac Mini to the Pi), I can very easily copy directories over with no hassle. For example, my top-level music folder was copied over from my Mac to the Pi using: rsync -avz --progress -e "ssh -p <custom_port_num>" "/mac/path/to/music/" username@<pi_IP_address>:/mnt/dietpi_userdata/music/. Remember to always add an -n (dry run) flag to double-check before running such tasks. Last night, I let it run overnight, and it copied around 200GB of music over—no problem! I was too excited and forgot to check when it finish / how long it took in total though. :P Other than using rsync I also like using Syncthing. So I got the Pi and folders setup again so that I have a “dropbox” folder on my Mac that can quickly share files to the Pi and vice versa. Closing Self-hosting is a great way to learn and I personally find it extremely rewarding. Being able to run things on hardware you own (or a subscription to a VPS) and having full access and control of where your data lives is incredible. That’s the reason I got into it in the first place. Nowadays, with the RAMpocalypse, it doesn’t really make sense though to buy a Pi to tinker with since everything is so expensive now. But if you have existing hardware though, I highly recommend you playing with some Docker containers, or even Kubernetes / Ansible if you like that kinda stack more (I don’t know much about those, but one day I want to try!) My favourite place to discover services to self-host is this awesome-list. If you want to read about my beginnings with homelabbing, see my first post in the Homelab Beginner series: Booting a Pi with SSD. That’s all the updates I have on my homelab situation. I will finish setting up the rest of the services soon and the next thing will probably to try either Arcane or Dokploy to see if the Pi can cope with the extra burden. A nice monitoring app would be nice too, but there are so many to choose from (Grafana, Prometheus, Uptime Kuma)? What is your favourite monitoring dashboard? [For up-to-date content, visit BurgeonLab directly (XML feeds don't fetch updates in real-time). For topic-specific feeds, visit /subscribe. Thanks for reading my blog using a RSS reader!]