Hey, I have to „draw“ or make notes of my selfhosting stuff. It runs so smooth that I sometimes really forget where a service is running or how to reach the web-Interface.
For sure I have a password- and link-manager, but I would like another independent note with the structure of my selfhosting.
Usually I use Joplin. Is there a plugin that shows me a kind of a map?
Or are there other apps - maybe wikis - that do it much easier/better than that?
How do you document your selfhosting?
I’ve used https://draw.io (apparently https://app.diagrams.net/ now) before for this exact purpose. I mapped out network, devices, and services.
Great tool for documenting your setup. I use this at work a lot
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.
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 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.
I like draw.io for process diagrams.
Draw.io is also totally open and is able to be integrated into many different tools - so chances are your tool of choice already has a plug in for it. For example, nextcloud does.
You can even self-host it and use it with Nextcloud.
I’ve seen some dashboards around, is this what you’re looking for?
Hmmm, I have a few dockers, but most stuff is running in lxc‘s (Proxmox). Btw: I tried Heimdall (or Homar?) but I had to enter all services by hand. Is there a way or an app to automate that?
Is there a way or an app to automate that?
Sadly, not to my knowledge. It’s an app-by-app process. I could see an Ansible play or similar potentially fulfilling such a role, but I’m not aware of any existing projects.
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.
A frontpage with links to all services and a monitoring app like Monitoror to allow me to check what’s running.
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)
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.
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?
As long as you have your config files and whatever data from the app (both should be mapped from the container to the host), just copy it to the new system and start your container.
I have all my config files on my nas, but too many of my apps run off dbs so I need to figure out a way to backup the local database folder so I can have the actual data on my nas as well as just the configs.
