Selfhosted

Everything is deployed via ansible - including nameservices. So I already have the description of my infra in ansible, and rest is just a matter of writing scripts to pull it in a more readable form, and maybe add a few comment labels that also get extracted for easily forgettable admin URLs.

If I have to draw diagrams, I use D2 https://d2lang.com/

It's a very simple to use code to diagram language.

It has plugins for vscode and obsidian.

It's open source that you can run locally, with the exception of their proprietary visualization engine. But I don't use that one, just use ELK.

I’ve used https://draw.io (apparently https://app.diagrams.net/ now) before for this exact purpose. I mapped out network, devices, and services.

Zabbix or Cacti are nice ways to draw maps that also serve a functional role in keeping track of the activity and alerting.

I kinda just hold it all in my head and fix stuff when I notice it's broken.

My stuff is all in docker-compose with a stack/service structure, so listing it is as simple as running tree, and reading the individual YAML files if I need in-depth details.

I use self-hosted draw.io together with the Draw.io Nextcloud integration for a diagram, and Wiki.js to write down some important information. If you prefer something lighter, check out DokuWiki. There are many other options for a Wiki like Bookstack or django-wiki.

you mentioned you've used joplin. All my notes are in markdown and I've been using Obsidian instead. Obsidian includes support for mermaid and can render (relatively simple) flowcharts.

https://obsidian.md/ https://mermaid.js.org/syntax/flowchart.html

I use Cockpit to manage my system and containers and Dashy as a browser dashboard. It's similar to Heimdall but more minimal.

I also run Otterwiki and I'm planning on documenting my setup, but I haven't got around to it yet.

I've seen some dashboards around, is this what you're looking for?

• https://github.com/gethomepage/homepage
• https://github.com/pawelmalak/flame

I like draw.io for process diagrams.

I use Netbox. It’s built by the team at Digital Ocean for managing their infrastructure. It can run in a docker container for easy management and compatibility. You can use as few or as many features as you need. There are a lot of native features and if there’s something missing you can extend functionality with plugins. I use the plugin netbox-topology-views to visualize my physical and logical network maps. This may be overkill for most home labs or home networks.

Netbox GitHub

Netbox-docker GitHub

I use Heimdall and Portainer myself, and I'd recommend them both. Portainer is for keeping a visual on Docker and/or Kubernetes containers, while Heimdall acts as a "home page" / front end for your various web GUIs (incl. Portainer).

I’m using self hosted wiki.js and draw.io. Works a treat, and trivial to backup with everything in Postgres.

I used to use ansible and helm, but it is overkill for my case. Today I basically use a combo of markdown and bash scripts, the combination of them allows me to run the scripts straight from my IDE.

I'm coding them down as plantuml network code and render them using a selfhosted plantuml Server.

In the end my whole admin guide resides in a obsidian notebook as markdown There is even a plugin that renders plantuml code within obsidian

The nice thing: everything is just code and can be moved to any other tool (had my documentation in a local gitlab repo, but I swapped gitlab out for gitea)

There's no forgetting where I have something hosted. If I ssh to service.domain.tld I'm on the right server. My services are all in docker compose. All in a ~/docker/service folder, that contains all the volumes for the service. If there's anything that needed doing, like setting up a docker network or adding a user in the cli, I have a readme file in the service's root directory. If I need to remember literally anything about the server or service, there's an appropriately named text file in the directory I would be in when I need to remember it.

If you just want a diagram or something, there are plenty of services online that will generate one in ASCII for you so you can make yourself a nice "network topology" readme to drop in your servers' home directory.

Excalidraw in combination with wikijs, both self hosted of course thru portainer.

I still use Dia Diagram Editor for most things. I just wish it was still being updated.

A frontpage with links to all services and a monitoring app like Monitoror to allow me to check what's running.

This is an intersting thread because I read through the lines the concerns that many have about losing parts of their homelab. Something I too am concerned about. While I have learnt to put my data securely on NAS with docker compose (I.e. docker image runs on VM while data i s stored on NAS and nas dataset is mounted via NFS on VM), in still not clear ho I save the config on the docker container. Basicalky, if I want to move that docker image to a new VM, how do I go about it?

Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:

4 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 15 acronyms.

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