Homelab ops essentials
Updated 2026-07-21 · 8 min read · By Ben Liu
Monitoring, reverse proxy, updates awareness, and a dashboard — the boring layer that keeps experiments alive.
Ops before hobbies
Pick one reverse proxy and stick with it for a year. Add a homepage so services are discoverable. Monitoring can wait until you have more than three containers — but backups cannot.
Choose one dashboard
Homepage and Heimdall overlap. Deploy one. Spend the saved time documenting ports, volumes, and restore steps.
Projects in this collection
Tools in this stack are listed for context. This column leads with guides — open each project only when you need a deeper lab note.
Caddy
Powerful, enterprise-ready, open source web server with automatic HTTPS.
Nginx Proxy Manager
Docker container for managing Nginx proxy hosts with a simple, powerful interface.
Homepage by gethomepage
Highly customizable homepage (or startpage / application dashboard) with Docker and service API integrations.
Heimdall
Elegant solution to organise all your web applications.