homelab/readme.md

Homelab IaC

This repository hosts my homelab infrastructure setup, built using Ansible & Gitea Workflows.

Getting started

You'll need to install Ansible Playbook, either through APT or another avenue.

sudo apt install ansible-core

Once you've done so, configure the hosts file to direct to your server(s). You'll need to deal with the SSH setup, alongside setting up the host variables for each service you want to use.

Project setup

I have this project set up like so;

• tasks/ - All of the playbooks for the services I deploy
• roles/ - More comprehensive tasks, like FiveM which requires multiple JNinja templates
• scripts/ - Any utility scripts, like the one used for deployment
• host_vars/ - All host variables, containings variables for each service
• main.yml - Playbook that contains all the setup for the automated deployment

Deployment

In my lab, I have a Git runner sitting on my local network. I use this to deploy changes to this repository across all of my machines.

The business logic for how this is done is in the scripts/deploy_containers.py script, which handles

• Deploying new containers
• Redeploying changed containers based on the Git diff
• Redeploying VPN-based containers that need to restart when Gluetun does
• Redeploying containers when secrets update
• Cleaning up containers/images when tasks are removed

This uses tags in main.yml, structured as {container}_deploy - so if I update Immich, it will run ansible-playbook with the argument --tags immich_deploy.

When secrets for a specific host are detected as updated, it will run the deploy tasks for all containers that host has (-l {host}) to refresh environment variables.