Dockerized Home-Server with Ansible

Ansible playbook for configuring a dockerized home-server running nextcloud, photoprism, borgbackup, python-telegram-bot, nginx-proxy, acme-companion, binance-trade-bot, watchtower, offlineimap, calcardbackup, and other utilities.

Overview

This is just a fun project to launch a home-server on an old ThinkPad running Ubuntu Focal Fossa. It should only be used as an inspiration.

The home-server is configured using Ansible and runs (almost) everything using docker-compose.

The Jinja template for the docker-compose file can be found in ansible/roles/docker/templates/docker-compose.yml.j2.

The home-server features:

• nextcloud with mariadb and redis
• photoprism with mariadb
• nginx proxy with acme companion
• server status using python-telegram-bot
• binance trading bot with api¹
• automatic backups (borgbackup, rsync, mysqldump, offlineimap, calcardbackup, lftp)
• automatic updates (watchtower, Ubuntu livepatch, pulling and pruning of docker images)
• DDNS updater
• scheduled suspend and wake using rtcwake

Ansible roles

1. Post-install configuration: The role in ansible/roles/common sets up basic packages, Ubuntu Livepatch, the admin user, SSH, UFW, TLP, systemd, cron, and rtcwake.

2. Docker-Compose: The role in ansible/roles/docker creates the docker user, installs docker and docker-compose, prepares the docker repos, networks, mounts, cronjobs, and the systemd service. Then it starts and configures the docker-compose services.

How-To

If docker-compose is installed on the controller, one can use the docker-compose.yml specification to set up the home-server as follows:

1. Create ansible/hosts.yml and ansible/group_vars/all/vault.yml based on ansible/hosts.example.yml and ansible/group_vars/all/vault.example.yml.
2. Choose a password and encrypt these files: ANSIBLE_VAULT_PASSWORD=ansible_vault_password DOCKER_UID=$(id -g) DOCKER_GID=$(id -u) docker-compose up vault-encrypt
3. Set up the home-server: ANSIBLE_VAULT_PASSWORD=ansible_vault_password docker-compose up ansible-install

Otherwise, one can also install ansible in a virtual environment and directly start the playbook ansible/site.yml.

Footnotes

1. While you most likely won't get rich doing this, it serves as a good baseline that can be improved by, e.g., adding sentiment analysis of news feeds and time series forecasting. ↩