CM5388 Homelab
A complete, reproducible self-hosted stack on a single FriendlyElec CM5388 board — 20+ services, fully containerized, documented to rebuild from scratch.
Self-hosting usually ends up as a pile of undocumented containers that only the person who built it can operate — and that nobody, including future-you, can rebuild after a disk dies.
I treated the homelab as a living blueprint: every service is a sanitized Docker Compose file, every decision is written down, and the whole thing is reproducible from a freshly flashed board. CasaOS sits on top for day-to-day management; the docs carry the actual knowledge.
Containerized service stack
Media (Jellyfin/Plex + the *arr stack), photos (Immich), home automation (Home Assistant), personal cloud (Seafile), DNS-level ad-blocking (AdGuard Home) and more — all as Compose files.
Kill-switched downloads
qBittorrent and slskd forced through ProtonVPN WireGuard via Gluetun, so traffic drops dead if the tunnel does.
Secure remote access
Nginx Proxy Manager, Cloudflare Tunnel and Tailscale for getting in from anywhere without exposing the box directly.
Infrastructure you can’t rebuild is a liability, not an asset. Writing the docs as I went — to the point a stranger could reproduce the stack — was the difference between a hobby and something I actually trust.