Today, I took another step in enhancing my homelab. As a huge fan of the self-hosted community, I've spent the past year experimenting with my own home servers, running various services and applications. My latest project is aimed at solving a recurring concern: what happens if a drive fails or, more plausible, if I fuck something up.

In my professional life, these fears are mitigated by using version control, cloud-based infrastructure, and CI/CD pipelines for deployments. So I thought, why not apply the same principles to my homelab?

Why Not GitHub?

My first instinct was to use what I already knew—GitHub and GitHub Actions. While this seemed like a solid option, I had some reservations. For one, my code would be stored on GitHub's servers, which is a dealbreaker for many in the self-hosted community. While I'm personally okay with that, the self-hosting option was too tempting to ignore. Moreover, using GitHub Actions (in the cloud) to connect to my home server (on my local network) comes with complexities, especially since I don’t have a static IP address.

Exploring Gitea

After some research, I discovered that GitHub Actions and GitLab CI/CD have self-hosted alternatives. But I also came across Gitea, an open-source alternative that had everything I needed and is compatible with the GitHub Actions syntax.

Installation and Setup

My homelab runs on Proxmox, and I often use the Proxmox Helper Scripts repository to simplify service installations. Thankfully, there was an LXC container script available for Gitea, which made installation very quick and easy.

Setting Up PostgreSQL

The first hurdle was setting up a database for Gitea (I did not know this was a requirement). It supports both MySQL and PostgreSQL, but from what I read, PostgreSQL is the preferred choice of the Gitea team, offering better, quicker support. Luckily, Proxmox had a helper script for PostgreSQL as well. Here’s a quick summary of the setup commands I used:

# Change the PostgreSQL user password
passwd postgres

# Log in as the postgres user
su - postgres

# Change the admin password
psql -c "ALTER USER postgres WITH PASSWORD 'your-password';"

# Create a Gitea user with the appropriate role
CREATE USER gitea WITH PASSWORD 'your-password';
CREATE ROLE gitea WITH LOGIN PASSWORD 'gitea';

# Create the Gitea database and assign the gitea user
CREATE DATABASE giteadb WITH OWNER gitea TEMPLATE template0 ENCODING UTF8 LC_COLLATE 'en_US.UTF-8' LC_CTYPE 'en_US.UTF-8';

# Exit PostgreSQL
\\q

Configuring Gitea

Once Gitea was installed, I changed the IP address of the LXC to a fixed one so it would never change. However if you want to go quicker you can use the IP address which is showed at the end fo the installation process.

Once you visit your gitea page, you should be greated with a configuration page. Fill in the details of your postgres database and click on "install Gitea".

If all went well you should now have your own self hosted Gitea system. (I already added some repositories in the screenshot below.)

Setting up Gitea action runners

Next, I wanted to automate some deployment tasks using Gitea Actions. Both Gitea and PostgreSQL were running in LXC containers on Proxmox, but for the action runner, I used Docker Compose on my local Windows machine.

I used docker compose to setup a compose file for the action runner (which I just took from the Gitea documentation page)

version: "3.8"
services:
  runner:
    image: gitea/act_runner:nightly
    environment:
      CONFIG_FILE: /config.yaml
      GITEA_INSTANCE_URL: "http://192.168.1.72:3000"
      GITEA_RUNNER_REGISTRATION_TOKEN: "${REGISTRATION_TOKEN}"
      GITEA_RUNNER_NAME: "testrunner"
      GITEA_RUNNER_LABELS: "ubuntu-latest:docker://node:16-bullseye"
    volumes:
      - ./config.yaml:/config.yaml
      - ./data:/data
      - /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock

Getting the registration token

To register the runner, I needed a token. This can be generated by going to Site Administration from the user dropdown in the top-right corner of Gitea. Under Actions > Runners, I clicked "Create New Runner" to get the token, which I then inserted into the Docker Compose file (I still need to find a way to do this more securely but this is how I do it for now locally on my PC).

Fixing Runner Issues

When I tried running the Docker Compose file, I encountered an error: Gitea couldn’t find the config.yaml file because Docker had mistakenly created it as a folder.

2024-10-27 15:43:34 Error: invalid configuration: open config file "/config.yaml": read /config.yaml: is a directory

After deleting the folder and recreating it as a file, everything worked, and the runner appeared in Gitea.

Setting up the labels

The next issue I encounterd was that I used the wrong label in my docker compose. It is important to use the right labels. Otherwise the Gitea Action might not know certain actions. At first I got an error on the step: "actions/checkout@v4". After fixing the label to "ubuntu-latest:docker://node:16-bullseye", my issue was solved. More info on the labels can be found on the Gitea documentation.

Testing the action runner

To test if everything was working I used the example of "The Homelabber". I cloned his/her example repository, linked it to my Gitea account, and pushed a commit. The action triggered perfectly, showing all green checkmarks!

Acknowledgments

This blogpost/guide is completely built with the help of the excelent blogposts of The Homelabber. Although (s)he does not have completely the same setup as me, the blog provided me with a lot of help. Next to that I have to say the Gitea documentation is very thoroughly and nicely written.

Next steps

I’m really happy with how this project turned out. The next steps include moving the action runner to Proxmox and setting up a reliable backup solution for my repositories. I’m still debating whether to sync them with GitHub, offload the code to cloud storage (Google One, OneDrive, Dropbox, etc.), or simply store a copy on my local NAS.

And so another small step has been taken to automate my entire homelab!

Keep on labbing! ;)

To create my personal space on the web I needed to find the right technology. I wanted an easy to use CMS which gave me some headroom for the future.

I decided to dive back into the world of web technologies and create my own blog. Boy, have things changed since I created my last website 5 years ago.

In this post, I will take you through the process of me starting from the idea of creating a blog to this first post.

CMS

It took me maybe 20 minutes to realize I was too long out of the game to create something from scratch. I looked into the latest trends in web dev technologies, and things have clearly changed since the day I created my last website. I was hesitating a bit to create a website using a static site generator, but in the end, I chose the easy way.

When looking for "self-hosted blog" on Reddit, it quickly became clear there was one favorite across the open-source, self-hosting community: Ghost. It is an easy-to-use CMS which is completely open-source. You can choose to let Ghost do the hosting, but they also offer an option to self-host your Ghost instance. I chose the self-hosting option.

Last but not least, it is ready for the future. Ghost offers a lot of features which I currently don't need: newsletter, members, payments, tracking,... You never know where this new pet project will bring me, at least I have some head room with ghost 😄

Domain Name

Registering a domain name is easy. I purchased mine at Combell since it is a Belgian company. However, I liked the idea of managing my domain name at the same place as my server, so I set up my DNS servers to the name servers of DigitalOcean so I could manage my domain from there.

Hosting

For hosting, I went for a classic: DigitalOcean. You get an easy-to-use interface for a reasonable price. There is even a Ghost app droplet in the DigitalOcean marketplace. Once I created the droplet using this guide from Ghost, I was faced with the second problem: the Ghost instance would not boot. After running the command "ghost doctor," I was notified my server had too little memory. After upgrading my VPS to an instance with 2 GB RAM, I was able to see my website.

Setup

Enabling the theme (I went with a free blog theme, which is fine for me) and disabling all subscription stuff, I was ble to create this first post. I am really amazed at how easy writing an article for my own Ghost website is. I don't need any technical stuff, and I can just write the content in a "Notion-like" interface.

Future

Later on, I would really like to implement some kind of version control. Ideally, I write my blog posts locally in markdown, push them to my Git repository, and my CI/CD pipeline makes sure it gets published.
Another thing I would like to experiment with is containerization. Ghost does offer a docker image. I would like to experiment with running the entire website via container technology. This way, I would like to improve my knowledge on this topic