Homelab

These are the manifests and IaC files for my homelab.

Installation (K3S)

I decided to use k3s as a lightweight Kubernetes cluster implementation, running on a mini pc in my local network as a single node.

Dualstack setup

Installing K3S with IPv4 and IPv6 (= dualstack) support requires specific settings. Here's the install command I've used.

curl -sfL https://get.k3s.io | INSTALL_K3S_EXEC="--disable servicelb \ 
--cluster-cidr=10.42.0.0/16,2001:cafe:42::/56 \
--service-cidr=10.43.0.0/16,2001:cafe:43::/112 \
--flannel-backend=none \
--disable-network-policy" sh -

Explanation:

• --disable servicelb disables the default load balancer service (I'm using metallb instead).
• The cluster_cidr and service_cidr options define the IPv4 and IPv6 ranges for the cluster and internal services, respectively.
• --flannel-backend=none and --disable-network-policy disable the default networking service flannel (because I couldn't get IPv6 to run with it and opted for calico instead).

Apps

Apps in my cluster were migrated via a lift-and-shift approach from systemd processes provisioned via ansible.

jellyfin

Jellyfin is an opensource media server and, thus, a replacement for the (arguably) more popular plex.

paperless

Paperless is an opensource document management system.

pihole

Pihole is a network service for blocking ads. It also comes equipped with a simple DNS server - and that's for I mostly use it for.

scrapyd

Scrapy is my favorite Python framework for web crawling tasks. It's mature, has sensible modules and a lot of quality of life features. Scrapy's main concept is the Spider class that contains the crawl logic. One can use Scrapy's CLI to start such a Spider. For deployment of spiders, there's a daemon service with a JSON API called scrapyd. It may schedule and spawn crawling processes based on spiders.

It's tempting to improve scrapyd to start Kubernetes jobs instead and, indeed, there's some effort in implementing a kubernetes-native scrapyd version: scrapyd-k8s. I'm not convinced of its maturity yet but I'll definitely spend some time trying this one out.

Finally, there's also scrapydweb that provides a nice frontend for scrapyd.