Architecture

An overview of how the homelab infrastructure layers connect.

Pipeline

The deployment follows a four-stage pipeline:

graph LR
    A[Packer] -->|VM templates| B[Terraform]
    B -->|Provisioned VMs| C[Ansible]
    C -->|Configured hosts| D[Docker]

1. Packer builds base VM templates (Ubuntu/Debian) on Proxmox with cloud-init
2. Terraform provisions VMs from those templates across environments
3. Ansible configures the VMs, installs Docker, and deploys services
4. Docker Compose runs all application containers

Environments

Environment	Purpose	Location
WIL	Development and primary	Local
NYC	Production	Remote

Key Design Decisions

• Docker Compose over Kubernetes for simplicity
• Split-horizon DNS with BIND9 for internal resolution
• SOPS + Age for secrets encryption at rest
• Caddy for automatic HTTPS with minimal configuration
• Task runner for unified command interface