ansible

tutorials

Ansible for the Homelab — Bonus: Deploying Your Own Code

The series so far has covered deploying off-the-shelf services - Ghost, Portainer, n8n. Those are straightforward: pull a published image, write a compose file, start the container. Deploying your own code is different. You own the Dockerfile, you manage the build, and your app has its own secrets and configuration

tutorials

Ansible for the Homelab — Part 6: Cloudflare Integration

In Part 5 we deployed services using Docker and Ansible. Those services are running inside the homelab, accessible on the local network. But to reach them from outside - without opening firewall ports or exposing your home IP - you need a tunnel. This is the final piece: using Ansible

tutorials

Ansible for the Homelab — Part 5: Deploying Services with Docker

In Parts 3 and 4 we got our playbooks organized and our secrets locked down. Now it's time to actually deploy something. This is where Ansible starts earning its keep - instead of SSHing into a machine and running docker compose up by hand, you describe the deployment

tutorials

Ansible for the Homelab — Part 4: Secrets Management with Ansible Vault

By now your playbooks are doing real work - bootstrapping machines, installing Docker, managing roles. At some point you're going to want to commit all of this to git. And that's when you notice the problem: your inventory and group vars contain API keys, tokens, and

tutorials

Ansible for the Homelab — Part 3: Roles and Structure

In Part 2 we bootstrapped a new machine using a single playbook - one file, one long list of tasks. It worked great. But that file is 150 lines, and every time you want to bootstrap another machine you're pointing at the same monolith. Want to reuse part

tutorials

Ansible for the Homelab — Part 2: Your First Playbook

In Part 1 we installed Ansible and built an inventory. Now let's put it to work on something you'll actually run every time you stand up a new machine. Every time I spin up a new LXC container or VM, the same manual steps happen. That&

ansible

Ansible for the Homelab — Part 1: Installation and Your First Inventory

Before you can automate anything, you need Ansible installed and pointed at your machines. That's what this post covers — getting Ansible running and teaching it about your homelab. Installing Ansible Ansible runs on Linux or Mac. You only install it on the machine you'll be running

tutorials

Ansible for the Homelab — Series Introduction

This is a practical, hands-on series for anyone who manages more than one machine at home and is tired of repeating the same manual steps. We'll use Ansible to automate everything from initial server setup to deploying real services - including secrets management, Docker, Cloudflare tunnels, and your