Credit: Patrick Campanale / How-To Geek

Are you looking for new homelab projects to try out this weekend? I absolutely love my homelab and trying out new projects myself. This weekend, you should focus on getting the bare essentials up and running in your homelab.

Set Up a NAS

Credit: Andrew Heinzman / How-To Geek

If you don’t already have a storage server in your homelab, then it’s time to change that. Setting up a NAS doesn’t have to be difficult, and one belongs in every homelab.

You likely don’t need to spend any money to spin up a NAS, either. You can turn an old desktop into a storage server, or even get some recycled e-waste with an old rack-mount server for free or cheap to start your storage server journey.

There’s both free and paid operating systems out to help you create your own NAS. I personally prefer Unraid, but TrueNAS Community Edition (Scale) and OpenMediaVault are two free and open source operating systems to power your storage server.

Having a NAS in your homelab nets many benefits. For starters, you’ll gain a centralized storage server. Instead of having several hard drives scattered around your office, you’ll just have one central location to handle all of your storage needs.

Another benefit is having one place to store your computer backups. Whether you’re using Time Machine or another backup software, most will integrate with remote storage like a NAS natively.

One of my favorite features of having a NAS is remotely accessing my files. If I’m not at home, I can mount my storage server to my laptop and access 60TB of storage from anywhere in the world over my VPN.

So, if you haven’t built a storage server yet, then you definitely should get one going this weekend!

Credit: Unraid

Unraid

OS Unraid

Unraid is a Linux-based NAS operating system that focuses on storage capacity through its parity system instead of traditional RAID.

Credit: TrueNAS

TrueNAS

Operating system TrueNAS

Ease of use Moderate

TrueNAS Scale (Community Edition) is a free NAS-focused operating system built on OpenZFS. With support for Docker, virtual machines, and a robust ZFS-based storage array, TrueNAS is a fantastic choice for those who want to build a storage server without spending any additional money on an operating system. Plus, ZFS offers extreme reliability when it comes to managing your storage system.

Install Docker

Credit: Lucas Gouveia/How-To Geek | pixalane/Aozorastock

Docker is the foundation of my homelab, and I couldn’t imagine not having it deployed. If you’re not entirely sure what Docker is, it’s essentially a way to run lightweight, pre-configured virtual machines called containers. There are other alternatives to Docker out there, but Docker is definitely one of the biggest players in the game.

The initial Docker deployment is pretty simple, you just have to add a few repositories to your package manager then install Docker.

I run Docker on all my servers at home, including my storage system, my virtual machine server, and all three of my Raspberry Pi’s. With Docker, I’m able to deploy a service within minutes without having to install lots of dependencies, which is one of my favorite features.

For instance, with Docker, you can deploy a website with WordPress or Ghost in under 10 minutes. Just the other day, my wife needed a WordPress website deployed to work on a site for a new idea. I was able to have a WordPress stack up, running, and accessible via my reverse proxy in about five minutes.

Docker is also great for other homelab services like Plex, Pi-hole, and so much more. If you’re not using Docker yet, it’s time to start.

Docker

OS Windows, macOS, Linux

Brand Docker

Docker is an application that makes it easy to develop new apps.

Create a Homelab Dashboard

Credit: Homepage

As you start to grow your homelab, you’re going to want a dashboard for accessing the various self-hosted services you inevitably spin up. I have 33 self-hosted services running on just one of my four Docker servers, let alone services that run exclusively on the others.

A dashboard is crucial for me to remember just what is hosted where. Eventually, I want to simplify my setup, but even then, I’ll still need an easy way to access the various services that I self-host.

With a homelab dashboard, I can simply click a button and visit the landing page for the various services. The dashboard I use is called Homepage, and it even has live widgets for certain services, so I can easily check on things without clicking through to the various services.

You can deploy a dashboard in a few minutes, then spend the rest of the weekend tweaking how it looks, functions, and is organized. I definitely recommend spinning one up this weekend and getting your homelab virtually neat and tidy before going on to bigger projects down the road.

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This is just three of my favorite homelab projects, but the list of things that you can run in your homelab is essentially never-ending. From powering my network with Docker to running the bare essentials I think a homelab should have, it’s easy to self-host, and it’s something I think every homelabber should get into.