Three new Homelab the Right Way ebooks: monitoring, containers and automation
Homelab the Right Way Books 7, 8 and 9 are out: Watch Your Homelab (monitoring and alerts), Containers Without the Chaos (Docker Compose, Caddy, HTTPS and single sign-on) and Automate Your Homelab (Git, cloud-init, OpenTofu and Ansible). Each has a free sample chapter.
The homelab series grows from six books to nine today. The three new ones cover the parts that turn a pile of machines into something you can trust: knowing when it breaks, running apps without the mess, and being able to rebuild the whole thing from a repository. They are written the same way as the first six: short chapters, real configs and commands, diagrams instead of walls of text, a checklist and a cheat sheet at the end. Every version number was checked against the project's own releases page or documentation in October 2026, and the books say where.
Each book is a PDF and EPUB, $19, and each one has a free sample: the cover, the full table of contents and one complete chapter.
Which one to start with
- You find out something broke when a person notices: Book 7, Watch Your Homelab.
- Your Docker host is a folder of half-remembered
docker runcommands: Book 8, Containers Without the Chaos. - You could not rebuild your lab from scratch without a weekend of clicking: Book 9, Automate Your Homelab.
Book 7: Watch Your Homelab
Monitoring, Alerts and Logs for Proxmox, Docker and Home Assistant with Prometheus, Grafana, Uptime Kuma and ntfy
The monitoring stack that tells you first, and only when it matters. It answers three questions for every machine you run (is it up, is it healthy, what happened?) with free, self-hosted tools: Uptime Kuma checks from the outside, Prometheus with node_exporter and cAdvisor for metrics, the Proxmox and Home Assistant exporters, Grafana dashboards that each answer one question, alert rules routed to your phone through ntfy, and logs in Loki shipped by Grafana Alloy (Promtail reached end of life on March 2, 2026).
Inside: Uptime Kuma monitors, retries, push heartbeats for backups and cron jobs, and a status page; self-hosted ntfy with access tokens and a priority ladder; a Prometheus stack with both retention limits set; Proxmox metrics through prometheus-pve-exporter with a read-only PVEAuditor token; SMART disk health and UPS status through NUT; a disk-fill ETA panel with predict_linear; alert rules with for: durations and Alertmanager routing; a runbook template and a monthly review.
58 pages, 25 diagrams. The free sample is all of Chapter 2, "Is It Up? Uptime Kuma".
Get the book · Read the free sample
Book 8: Containers Without the Chaos
Docker Compose, Reverse Proxies, Automatic HTTPS and Single Sign-On for Self-Hosters
Self-hosted apps on Docker without the mess: one Docker host in a Proxmox VM, one folder per stack, one reverse proxy as the only front door, real trusted HTTPS for internal names without opening a single port, one good login in front of every app, updates you choose instead of surprises, and backups you have actually restored.
Inside: where Docker should live on Proxmox and what the Proxmox docs recommend; the official Docker Engine install on Debian with log rotation set before the first container; why published ports skip ufw; every part of a compose.yaml you will use, plus a complete copy-ready stack; a tidy /srv/stacks layout with one shared proxy network; Caddy in front of everything with a DNS-01 wildcard certificate and split DNS at home; Authelia single sign-on with forward auth and two-factor; Compose secrets, pinned tags and Diun update notifications (Watchtower's repository was archived in December 2025); two-layer backups; and a troubleshooting routine that starts with evidence instead of deleting things.
63 pages, 22 diagrams. The free sample is all of Chapter 3, "Anatomy of a compose.yaml".
Get the book · Read the free sample
Book 9: Automate Your Homelab
Ansible, Cloud-Init, OpenTofu and Git for a Proxmox Lab You Can Rebuild in an Afternoon
A lab you can rebuild: the definitions live in Git, the secrets live in a vault, the data lives in your backups, and a timed rebuild drill proves the three fit together.
Inside: a self-hosted Forgejo repository with a push mirror and a repo layout that scales from three VMs to thirty; the Debian 13 cloud image turned into a Proxmox template with qm, SSH keys and a vendor snippet, and full clones that personalize themselves on first boot; VMs and containers declared with OpenTofu and the bpg/proxmox provider behind a least-privilege API token; Ansible inventory, ansible.cfg, idempotency, --check and --diff; a baseline role for every Debian box (users, SSH hardening with a drop-in, unattended-upgrades, time sync); Docker hosts and compose stacks deployed from the repository with secrets in ansible-vault; what is realistic for OPNsense and Home Assistant (scheduled config backups into Git and a documented restore path); and CI on Forgejo Actions with ansible-lint and tofu validate on every push, drift checks and the rebuild drill step by step.
58 pages, 22 diagrams. The free sample is all of Chapter 3, "Golden Images with Cloud-Init".
Get the book · Read the free sample
How they fit with the first six
Book 1 sets up Proxmox, OPNsense and Home Assistant; Book 3 is the backup playbook; Book 5 locks down the network; Book 6 makes Home Assistant automations reliable. The new three assume those exist and build on them: Book 7 watches all of it, Book 8 is where your self-hosted apps live, and Book 9 is how the whole lab gets written down and rebuilt. Each book stands on its own, with cross-references where another book goes deeper.
Bundles
All nine homelab books are in the Homelab Bundle ($59), and every book in the store, the Android series included, is in the Everything Bundle ($89). The code RIGHTWAY20 takes 20% off any order through October 31.
