DragonSenseiGuy’s Weblog

Making a Home Lab

23rd October 2025

Hello everyone in todays blog I will show you how I made my own Home Lab.

The main reason for making a home lab for me, was to have my own RSS reader that I could self host.

First I went to awesome-selfhosted for some inspiration, after a a few hours I decided on Glance, an open source and self hosting dashboard that puts all my feeds in one place. I went through the Installation Guide. I chose to use Docker as it the most simple and straightforward to setup for my needs, as I won’t be changing the source.

After this I started configuring the dashboard by adding RSS feeds, configuring twitch channels, HN, Lobster(HN and Lobster are in glance by default) and adding channels I most watch. For configuring the channel you have to provide the channel id, which you can access using this turorial.

Soon after, I realized this was not enough and spent a few more days going through a rabbit hole, what started as a simple RSS reader has now turned into 4 separate projects all hosted on a old ASUS laptop with 4GiB of RAM and 80GB of storage.

After going through awesome-selfhosted again I found 3 more applications that I would find useful.

1. Homepage
2. Code Server
3. Linkwarden

I chose Homepage for a singular page that takes you to all the other pages ie, a homepage. This is especially useful since all our URL’s will be in the form of domain/ip:port. Code Server for a Visual Studio Code instance in the web, this one was chosen specifically for it’s low resource consumption. I was thinking between Linkwarden , Karakeep and Linkding. Ultimately I liked the design of Karakeep and Linkwarden over Linkding and the ease of setup of Linkwarden. Also Linkwarden comes with an extenstion for Chromium) based browsers and Firefox(Gecko)) based browsers.

Homepage

Homepage was a simple docker setup with a few links to all the services, here is a screenshot of how it looks:

![[Homepage_homelab 1.png]]

The top has stats about the home lab and the search bar(uses DuckDuckGo) to search based on your query. Under all of that we can see a list of all services that I am hosting.

Code Server

The code server integration included a setup script which seems to not work on Linux(Ubuntu). I did the following commands:

mkdir code-server
cd code-server
nano docker-compose.yml

and in nano paste the following with some changes:

services:    
    code-server:
    image: codercom/code-server:latest
    container_name: code-server
    environment:
      - PASSWORD=changeme # Change the password
      # Optional: mount your home directory or projects
      # - TZ=America/New_York
    volumes:
      - ./code-server:/home/coder
    ports:
      - "3003:8080" # Port
    restart: unless-stopped

and run

docker compose up -d

and visit https://locahost:3003

Uptime Kuma

Uptime Kuma was one of the easiest to setup projects that I have seen, it requires little to no configuration at all. All it took to get it up and running was to run these four commands

mkdir uptime-kuma
cd uptime-kuma
curl -o compose.yaml https://raw.githubusercontent.com/louislam/uptime-kuma/master/compose.yaml
docker compose up -d

and you can go and visit http://localhost:3001

Linkwarden

Linkwarden is one if the harder and more time taking configurations requiring multiple steps, this is the Documentation for Installation. Also note for generating the NEXTAUTH_SECRET and MEILI_MASTER_KEY you need to run openssl rand -base64 32 .

Tailscale

There is still a problem though, how do I access the server outside of my local network? The answer is Tailscale. Tailscale is a free VPN that lets you route your traffic to your home router, this means that even though you are connected to a wifi somewhere else your device and browser still think that you are connected to your local network, this makes sure you can access your home lab from anywhere in the world. You can always buy a domain and host it on the Internet but, then you have to deal with DDOS and Brute force attacks to prevent attackers from gaining access to your website.

There is another advantage to this, instead if memorizing the IP address of the server or the Tailscale device address you can simply type in the name of the device in Tailscale for example instead of 100.x.x.x:port it would be deviceName:port which makes memorizing much easier.