Docker on The Home Lab

Immich: Your Self-Hosted Google Photos Replacement

Fri, 13 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Why You Need This

Let me paint you a picture. You’ve got 80,000 photos scattered across your phone, your partner’s phone, and three old laptops. They’re on Google Photos — until Google changes their storage policy again, or you get locked out of your account, or you just get tired of feeding a trillion-dollar company your entire family’s memories.

Or maybe you’re already off Google and your photos are just… sitting in a folder on your NAS. Perfectly preserved, completely unsearchable, impossible to share.

Homelab Monitoring with Prometheus and Grafana

Sat, 07 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Why Monitor Your Homelab?

Without monitoring, you find out about problems when something stops working. With it, you see a disk filling up days before it causes an outage, catch a VM chewing CPU in the middle of the night, or notice your UPS battery health declining. It turns reactive firefighting into proactive maintenance.

The Prometheus + Grafana stack is the industry standard for this and runs comfortably on modest hardware. My monitoring stack runs in Docker on a dedicated LXC container and uses less than 1 GB RAM.

Self-Hosted Media Streaming with Jellyfin

Sat, 21 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Why Jellyfin?

Jellyfin is a free, open-source media server — the community fork of Emby after Emby went partially closed-source. It lets you stream your personal media library (films, TV shows, music, photos) to any device through a browser or app.

Compared to Plex, Jellyfin is fully free with no premium tier. Transcoding, sync, and apps are all free. There’s no phoning home to Plex servers — all metadata and authentication is local.

Docker vs LXC Containers in Proxmox: When to Use Each

Sat, 27 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The Confusion

New Proxmox users often ask: should I run Docker inside a VM, Docker inside an LXC container, or use Proxmox’s native LXC containers directly? The answer depends on what you’re running and what you value. This post breaks down the trade-offs.

What Is LXC?

LXC (Linux Containers) is an OS-level virtualisation technology. LXC containers share the host kernel but have their own filesystem, process tree, network stack, and user namespace. They boot like lightweight VMs — you run pct start 101 and get a full Linux environment in under a second.

Reverse Proxy and SSL with Nginx Proxy Manager

Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The Problem Nginx Proxy Manager Solves

As your homelab grows, you accumulate services running on various IPs and ports: Proxmox on :8006, Jellyfin on :8096, Nextcloud on :443, Home Assistant on :8123. Remembering port numbers is tedious, but the bigger issue is HTTPS — browsers complain about self-signed certificates, and accessing services over plain HTTP on your LAN is a security risk.

Nginx Proxy Manager (NPM) solves both problems. It’s a Docker container with a web UI that lets you: