Containers I Run in My Homelab 2023 Edition
What containers I run in my homelab as of the beginning of 2023.
Remember when I told you about how fun containers are? Here's a little tour of what I have running in containers at home.
Here's the rundown. As of January 2023 I am running 17 containers on my server. Some of them doing similar things, and others just existing to exist because I was curious. I'm going to go through them down the list based on this screenshot.
The Containers
Insert clickbait phrase here like "#3 will shock you" or something.
Below are the containers I run and what they do. This time I'm also testing out the toggle feature in Ghost for the list so have fun with that.
7daystodie
This is a game server hosting 7 Days to Die. I have the settings bound to a local volume so it persists even if I decide to recreate the container or move it to a different host so that I can retain the settings and data.
cloudflare-ddns
This container runs a service that does a check of my IP address and then makes an update to Cloudflare to make sure the DNS entry matches. Very useful if you don't have a static IP address from your ISP (typical home internet that isn't business-class). This one specifically is for one of my throwaway domains that I use to test stuff with. As an added level of security I do have my IPs proxied through Cloudflare so I'm not exposing my home IP address. And don't worry, my firewall is set up securely enough to not let malicious traffic through and even auto blocks IP addresses attempting to access it if it detects a threat.
cloudflare-ddns-jermad14com
The same as my previous container, except I use it for my jermad14.com dynamic DNS. Goes to Cloudflare and updates whenever my IP address changes.
ghost-blogjermad14com-db-1
This runs the mysql database for this very website that you're on right now. Storing my data so that if I want to move the site somewhere else I don't lose any of my content.
ghost-blogjermad14com-ghost-1
This one runs the actual software for Ghost. I also have persistent storage for the content so I don't lost the photos or other things that I upload to this site if I need to move it.
heimdall
This runs a software that basically gives you a dashboard that you can customize with bookmarks and has some integration with different websites so it can give you stats. For instance if you hook up Pi-Hole to it you can see the traffic stats directly from the dashboard.
jellyfin
This container runs software that serves media similar to Plex, but is open-source and has some features that Plex doesn't. You can check out more on their website.
littlelink-server-jermad14com
ghcr.io/techno-tim/littlelink-server
This container runs a simple static webpage that works similar to Linktree. I got the code (and made some modifications) from a YouTube I sometimes watch named Techno Tim. He based it off of the LittleLink project and posted the code to create the Docker container in his GitHub repo.
mariadb
Just a simple mariadb instance that I used during early test phases to run a database inside of a container. Right now it stores data from my Minecraft server from various plugins so that I can keep the data if I move Minecraft elsewhere.
minecraft
This one runs... you guessed it, Minecraft! As with my other containers, the data is stored on a volume that I bind to the host so I can keep the data.
npm
This awesome piece of software is what I use to run web traffic from the outside and map it to containers hosted inside of my network. It's called Nginx Proxy Manager and it has made my life so much easier when self-hosting resources that I need available publicly because I don't have to manually open ports and deal with port forwarding on the firewall each time I run a new website.
pihole
Runs Pi-Hole, which is basically network-wide ad-blocking so that devices in my home network typically don't need an ad block software installed. The only problem is that some services, like Hulu, don't let you use their services unless you whitelist them from your ad blocker and I've come to find that trying to whitelist the specific ad sites kind of sucks because a lot of websites use several ad services. For systems like that I just point the DNS directly to my internal DNS server or straight to Cloudflare.
portainer
cr.portainer.io/portainer/portainer-ce
Runs the software I wrote about it my last post which gives me a GUI that allows me to manage my containers. This is the community edition of the software.
valheim
Game server running Valheim with persistent data storage.
vrising
Game server running V-Rising with persistent data storage.
watchtower
This is a really need management tool for your containers. It basically keeps your images updates and can even auto update containers. There are different configurations with this that you can do like if you wanted to only auto update some containers then you'd set up the tags in the configuration and then tag the ones you want it to monitor.
wikijs
Another website software that I was tinkering with where I just posted a few things about my home network as notes. I have it password-protected so you can't really get into it, but if you're interested you can get more information about it on their website.
Boom
That's it
So that's what I'm currently running in my homelab as far as containers go. I do constantly create new containers and then destroy them after I'm done feeding my curiosity but the ones I've listed are the ones that I am keeping around for a long time. Anyway, see ya later, alligator!