Building Your First Homelab: A Complete Beginner's Guide
Everything you need to know to set up a homelab from scratch - hardware selection, OS installation, Docker setup, and essential self-hosted services to run.
A homelab is a personal computing environment where you can experiment, learn, and run self-hosted services. Whether you're a developer, sysadmin, or just a tech enthusiast, a homelab is one of the best investments you can make.
Choosing Your Hardware
Budget Option: Raspberry Pi Cluster
Mid-Range: Mini PC
Power User: Refurbished Server
Operating System
For beginners, we recommend Proxmox VE - a free, open-source hypervisor that lets you run multiple virtual machines and containers on a single host.
Alternative options:
Essential Services to Self-Host
Getting Started with Docker
Install Docker and Docker Compose, then start with a simple stack:
services:
portainer:
image: portainer/portainer-ce
ports:
volumes:
pihole:
image: pihole/pihole
ports:
environment:
volumes:
portainer_data:
Next Steps
Once you have the basics running, explore more advanced topics like VLANs, VPN access, automated backups, and monitoring. The homelab community is incredibly welcoming - check out r/homelab and r/selfhosted for inspiration.
