Homelab Builds

n8n: Connect Everything With Visual Workflow Automation You have got a collection of services running on your Pi. Docker containers doing their thing. Uptime Kuma watching them. Ollama summarising text. Pi-hole filtering DNS. Each one works. None of them talk to each other. That is the difference between having containers and having infrastructure. Infrastructure is […]

Uptime Kuma: Know When Things Break Before Anyone Tells You Here’s a question that changed how I think about my homelab: if Pi-hole goes down at 2am, how would you know? Not how would you fix it — how would you even know it happened? You’d wake up, your family would complain that the internet

Ollama on Raspberry Pi 5: Run Local AI Models on Your Own Hardware Let me set expectations immediately: a Raspberry Pi 5 is not going to replace ChatGPT. It’s not going to run Llama 3 70B. It’s not going to generate images or do real-time voice transcription at any useful speed. What it will do

Home Assistant on Raspberry Pi 5: Event-Driven Architecture That Gets You Hired I’m going to let you in on a secret: the career reason to run Home Assistant has almost nothing to do with home automation. Home Assistant is an event-driven platform with a REST API, a WebSocket API, hundreds of integrations, a state management

Nginx Proxy Manager on Raspberry Pi 5: Proper URLs and SSL for Your Homelab You’ve got Docker running. Portainer’s giving you visibility. Pi-hole’s cleaning up your network. And you’re accessing everything by typing IP addresses and port numbers into a browser like it’s 2003. http://192.168.1.100:8080 for Pi-hole. https://192.168.1.100:9443 for Portainer. Whatever port your next service

Pi-hole on Raspberry Pi 5: Network-Wide Ad Blocking and DNS You Control Of all the projects in this series, Pi-hole delivers the fastest return on investment. Not in some abstract career-value sense — in the “my partner just thanked me for making the internet less annoying” sense. Within ten minutes of pointing your router at

Portainer on Raspberry Pi 5: See What Your Containers Are Actually Doing There is a moment in every homelab journey where you realise you have lost track of what is running. You SSH in, type docker ps, and stare at a wall of truncated container names, port mappings, and status fields that tell you technically

Docker on Raspberry Pi 5: Your Foundation for Everything Else Every other project in this series runs on Docker. The reverse proxy, the monitoring, the DNS, the automation platform, the AI models — all of it. Docker is not one of the ten projects. It is project zero. The foundation that everything else sits on.