JoelClaw

Self-Hosting Catalog as a Checklist for Infrastructure Gaps

·https://github.com/mikeroyal/Self-Hosting-Guide
repoinfrastructureself-hostinghomelabmonitoringcontainersnetworkingsecurity

reference catalog for joelclaw infrastructure decisions — monitoring, health checks, container logs, system metrics

Self-Hosting Catalog as a Checklist for Infrastructure Gaps

Mike Royal’s Self-Hosting Guide is a 6000+ line curated index of self-hosting tools organized by category — containers, monitoring, dashboards, automation, security, networking, DNS, backups, and about forty other verticals. It’s not a tutorial. It’s a lookup table for infrastructure decisions you haven’t made yet.

The real value isn’t any single tool recommendation. It’s the category coverage. When you’re building out a homelab or personal infrastructure stack, the hardest problem isn’t picking between Uptime Kuma and Gatus — it’s remembering that health checks are a category you need to address at all. This guide functions as a checklist: scan the sections, find the gaps in your stack, evaluate what fills them. The tools that jumped out as immediately relevant: Uptime Kuma for monitoring, Netdata for system metrics, Gatus for endpoint health checks, and Dozzle for container log viewing.

The guide also covers WireGuard and Tailscale setup in depth, plus sections on Docker, Kubernetes, Ansible, and Grafana — all of which are already in play or on the roadmap for the joelclaw infrastructure. The k3s cluster work (ADR-0025) and the move toward multi-node federation make the networking, service discovery, and log management sections particularly worth revisiting as the stack grows.

Key Ideas

  • Category coverage over tool depth — the guide’s value is mapping the full decision space, not deep-diving any single tool. Scan it for gaps you haven’t addressed.
  • Uptime Kuma — self-hosted monitoring with a clean UI, status pages, and notifications. Lightweight alternative to Grafana for uptime-specific concerns.
  • Netdata — real-time system metrics with zero configuration. Runs per-node, which maps well to a multi-machine Tailscale setup.
  • Gatus — health check endpoints with conditions (status code, response time, body content). Could complement the Inngest worker health checks.
  • Dozzle — real-time Docker container log viewer in the browser. Lighter than docker logs piped through grep when debugging Inngest worker issues.
  • Sections on Ansible and configuration management — relevant as the joelclaw stack grows beyond what launchd plists and manual SSH can maintain.
  • WireGuard deep-dive — covers PiVPN, pfSense, and OpenWRT setups. Useful reference if Tailscale ever needs supplementing.

Links

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