🏠 Homelab
Guides for building a sovereign, privacy-first homelab you fully control.
This section focuses on:
- Self-hosting critical services
- Eliminating unnecessary cloud dependency
- Designing systems that are stable, observable, and maintainable
- Taking back ownership of your data and infrastructure
⚠️ Core Principle
If you don’t control your infrastructure, you don’t control your data.
🧭 What You'll Find Here
- Service Deployment → What to self-host and how to run it reliably
- Networking → Secure access without exposing your entire system
- Storage & Backup → Data durability and recovery strategies
- Standards → Patterns that prevent your lab from becoming chaos
🔧 Core Areas
🧩 Services
Applications worth self-hosting and how to deploy them correctly.
Focus:
- Media (Plex, Jellyfin)
- File storage (Nextcloud)
- Monitoring (Grafana, Prometheus, Uptime Kuma)
- Automation and tooling
Not everything should be self-hosted — only what you can realistically maintain.
🌐 Networking
How everything connects — securely and predictably.
Includes:
- Reverse proxies (Nginx Proxy Manager)
- Private access (Tailscale, VPNs)
- DNS design
- Service exposure strategy
Warning
Opening ports blindly is how homelabs get compromised.
This section prioritizes controlled access, not convenience.
💾 Storage
Your data layer; where most homelabs fail.
Focus:
- NAS integration
- Mount strategies (NFS, SMB)
- Backup architecture
- Media and archive organization
If your backup strategy isn’t tested, it doesn’t exist.
📏 Standards
The difference between a clean lab and an unmaintainable mess.
Includes:
- Docker Compose patterns
- Folder structures
- Naming conventions
- Environment variable management
- Git-backed infrastructure
Tip
Most homelab issues are not technical; they are organizational.
🧱 Design Philosophy
RebelRx Homelab is built around:
- Local-first infrastructure
- Minimal external dependencies
- Clear separation of services
- Reproducible setups
It avoids:
- Over-engineering for the sake of complexity
- Blindly copying configs without understanding them
- “Set it and forget it” systems that silently break
📚 Guides
🚧 Guides In Development
- Mounting NAS Partitions
- VPN Tunnel with Tailscale
- Nginx Proxy Manager
- Self-Hosted Retro Gaming with RomM
🧠 Final Thought
Cloud platforms optimize for scale.
Your homelab should optimize for:
Control, reliability, and understanding.