We’re running a Docker container called Wallabag, which can be used to save cleanly formatted copies of web pages and articles. Smartphone (iPhone and Android) apps are available for Wallabag, making viewing the saved content easy on the go.
The following video explains what Wallbag does.
This video covers the installation of Wallabag using Docker Compose. It can run on any docker host.
This video also contains some good information on sources for other self-hosted apps.
We’re running a Docker container called RSSHub, which detects RSS feeds available on websites that we browse. You can learn more about RSS Hub here.
This page covers the installation and use of the RSSHub container and the associated RSSHub Radar Chrome browser extension.
We use the BazQux RSS Reader with our installation. The following shows our configuration for the RSS Hub Radar Chrome Extension, which is used with RSSHub –
Many of our applications and services run as Docker containers. Our monitoring dashboard solution covers two aspects of Docker container performance:
These data collectors enable several Grafana dashboards that help us to manage our Docker cluster.
We run a combination of Node Exporter and cAdvisor on each Docker host VMs. These containers scrape data for our Docker hosts and feed it to the Prometheus instance in our Docker stack.
The following video explains how all of this is set up –
Setting up Docker Server Monitoring – Node Explorer and cAdvisor
We are using several dashboards to implement our Docker monitoring solution.
We are using a modified version of the Grafana Dashboard above to monitor the overall performance of our Docker nodes.
We are using a modified version of the Grafana Dashboard above to monitor and enable drilling into detailed performance metrics for our Docker nodes.
We are using a modified version of the Grafana Dashboard above to monitor and enable a summary view of the containers in our Docker cluster.
We are using a modified version of the Grafana Dashboard above to monitor and enable drilling into the detailed performance of containers in our Docker cluster.
We are using a modified version of the Grafana Dashboard above to monitor and enable drilling into the performance of Windows VMs in our Docker cluster.
We set up a Grafana Dashboard to implement Proxmox Monitoring. The main components in our monitoring stack include:
The following sections cover the setup and configuration of our monitoring stack.
The following video explains how to set up a Grafana dashboard for Proxmox. This installation uses the monitoring function built into Proxmox to feed data to Influx DB.
And here is a video that explains setting up self-signed certificates –
Configuring Self-Signed Certificates
We are using the Proxmox [Flux] dashboard with our setup.
It is helpful to have access to files and directories associated with our Docker persistent volume stores. File Browser is a simple Docker container that provides a file manager.
The following video covers the installation and use of the File Browser container.
We’ve added a Grafana Monitoring and Logging system to our Home Lab. The system is based on Grafana, Prometheus, Grafana Loki, Promtail, Telegraf, and InFlux DB.
The following video covers the installation of our Grafana Monitoring and Logging monitoring stack.
Setup Logging and Monitoring in Docker
Grafana Lofi and Promtail work together to scape and store log data. These tools can scrape docker data and accept syslog data as well. The following video explains how to configure Loki and Promtail.
Configure Grafana Loki and Promtail for logs
There are a few details that we needed to do differently than the video:
The contents of /etc/docker/daemon.json are as follows:
{
"log-driver": "loki",
"log-opts": {
"loki-url": "http://localhost:3100/loki/api/v1/push",
"loki-batch-size": "400",
"loki-retries": "2",
"loki-max-backoff": "800ms",
"loki-timeout": "1s",
"keep-file": "true",
"mode": "non-blocking"
}
}
We have configured a combination of Loki and Promtail to accept Syslog events. Promtail does not support Syslog events using the UDP protocol. To solve this problem, we set up rsyslog running under the Ubuntu system, which hosts the Promtail Docker container, to consolidate and forward all Syslog events as a front end to Promtail. Information on configuring rsyslog as a front end to Promtail can be found here.
The following video provides some information on configuring dashboards and other monitoring capabilities.
We do a variety of software development and Java coding tasks. To make this easier and more accessible from all our computers, we will try VS Code and VS Code Server.
This tool allows editing using a web browser on any computer. The VS Code web interface is hosted from a server running in a Docker container.
The following video explains how to set up the tool and connect it to a GitHub repository.
VS Code Server Installation and Set Up
The following video suggests several useful VS Code plugin extensions.
Many services and devices in our home lab have web interfaces. We secure many of them using Nginx Proxy Manager as a reverse proxy.
Traefik Reverse Proxy provides ingress control and SSL certificates for our docker services. While Traefik can be used for services outside Docker, configuring it is complex and requires restarting the Trafik container. As a result, we also run Nginx PM in a container to enable SSL certificates and simple reverse proxy configuration of our web-based services outside of Docker.
Installing is easy. The following video explains the process, including using a DNS-01 challenge to obtain SSL certificates via Let’s Encrypt.
We configured a Docker macVLAN network for the Nginx PM container so that the proxy could determine the source IP addresses that access it. This enables IP filtering and other features.
We are running three Pihole installations, which enable load balancing and high availability for our DNS services. We also use a Cloudflare encrypted tunnel to protect information in external DNS queries via the Internet.
Our three instances are deployed on a combination of Docker host VMs in our Proxmox Cluster and a stand-alone Raspberry Pi Docker host.
Our software service stack for our dockerPiHole installs Pi includes the following applications:
Our combined stack was created using information in the following video:
Deploy PiHole with Cloudflare Tunnel in Docker
Unubtu VMs include a DNS caching server on port 53, which prevents Pihole from being deployed. To fix this, run the commands at this link on the host Ubuntu VM before installing the Pihole and Cloudflare Tunnel containers.
We must update our block lists by doing a Gravity pull. We do this daily via a cron job. This can be configured on the RPi host using the following commands –
# Edit the user crontab sudo crontab -u <user-id> -e # The following to the user crontab min hr * * * su ubuntu -c /usr/bin/docker exec pihole pihole -g | /usr/bin/mailx -s"RPi Docker - Gravity Pull" [email protected]
We are running the Watchtower container on all our stand-alone docker hosts to keep our containers up to date. The following video explains how to install and configure Watchtower.
Install and Configure Watchtower on Docker
We have Watchtower configured to detect and notify us about updated container images. We install these manually using Protainer.