homelab VS paperless-ngx

k8s is a lot easier for homelabs than it used to be, and imo it's quicker than nix for building a declarative homelab. templates like this one can deploy a cluster in a few hours: https://github.com/onedr0p/cluster-template

here's my home assistant deployment as a single file: https://github.com/pl4nty/homelab/blob/main/kubernetes/clust...

I deliberately nuked my onprem cluster a few weeks ago, and was fully restored within 2 hours (including host OS reinstalls). and most of that was waiting for backup restores over my slow internet connection

Can't talk about work, but my homelab is Azure and Oracle managed k8s (AKS/OKE), with onprem Talos soon (Turing Pi 2). My Flux monorepo has the details. OKE performs noticably worse (update cycle, features, control plane performance), but it provides 4 ARM cores and 24GB RAM free so I can't complain

Here's my cluster's IaC if you want to take a look, it's pretty optimised for web services though. It's all Linux too - I've attempted Windows containers but Windows apps don't often handle state well

It's been a good way to test ARM before I build a Pi cluster. My manifests and container builder are public if you want to take a look. I use a base layer for networking and observability, so it's easy to move stateless workloads, but I still need to sort out volume replication/backups

I steered a friend towards Paperless (and away from an LLM solution) as a way of searching/accessing GBs of architectural PDFs recently - so far, it’s apparently working well for them.

https://github.com/paperless-ngx/paperless-ngx

Paperless-ngx is a document management system that transforms your physical documents into a searchable online archive so you can find your physical documents easier. With features such as tags, full text search, multi-user permissions system, this is a dream for those who like to keep an organized folder of files and documents.

Since last year I’ve been configuring and maintaining my homelab setup and it is just amazing.

I’ve learned so much about containers, virtual machines and networking. Some of the self hosted applications like paperless-ngx [1] and immich [2] are much superior in terms of features than the proprietary cloud solutions.

With the addition of VPN services like tailscale [3] now I can access my homelab from anywhere in the world.

The only thing missing is to setup a low powered machine like NUC or any mini PC so I can offload the services I need 24/7 and save electricity costs.

If you can maintain it and have enough energy on weekends to perform routine maintenance and upgrades. I would 100% recommend setting up your own homelab.

[1] https://docs.paperless-ngx.com/

This has been posted a few times already, but I cannot tell you how life changing Paperless NGX is for organizing PDFs. As someone who wrangles all of the insurance and bills for my house, this open source software is so damn good.

https://docs.paperless-ngx.com/

I maintain Bash script to quickly set it up locally on Linux with Podman. Give it a spin if you want to kick the tires.

https://github.com/jdoss/ppngx

Personally, I use https://github.com/joeyates/imap-backup to archive all my emails and then only keep them on the remote server for as long as I need to (basically until I read them and respond or download an attachment into https://docs.paperless-ngx.com )