Personal homelab.

Project summary

My homelab is the environment where I deploy and operate my own projects. It gives me a real place to practise server administration, networking, security boundaries and incident response instead of only studying them in theory.

Problem being solved

Personal projects need somewhere reliable to run, and cloud hosting can hide the infrastructure lessons I want to learn. Running services myself forces me to understand deployment, routing, DNS, access control, backups and segmentation.

Target users

The public users are people visiting projects like Resleeve. The operator user is me: I need a maintainable environment where services are isolated, recoverable and easy to administer remotely.

Architecture overview

A Proxmox host runs VMs and LXC containers. Application services are Dockerised where that makes deployment easier. Network segments separate public-facing services from management surfaces. Cloudflare handles DNS and Zero Trust entry points, while Tailscale provides private remote administration.

Important technical decisions

I treat the homelab like production infrastructure, even when the traffic is small. Management tools are kept off the public internet, public apps sit behind controlled routes, and service boundaries are shaped by what each workload actually needs.

Difficult problems and solutions

The main challenge is balancing convenience with isolation. Tailscale keeps administration private without punching open broad firewall access, and Cloudflare Access protects internal dashboards that need a browser but should not be public.

Results and lessons learned

The homelab has become the backbone of the portfolio. It demonstrates that I can ship software and operate it, which has been just as important as writing the app code.