Homelab: Private Cloud and Observability environment with Docker

This repository contains the architecture and configuration of my local laboratory (Homelab). The objective of the project is to deploy a functional private cloud and a professional monitoring stack using containers, applying Infrastructure as Code (IaC) methodologies and security best practices.

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System Architecture

The environment is completely contanerized with Docker Compose and segmented into isolated networks to mitigate the attack surface

• Storage

  • Nextcloud
  • PostgreSQL15 (for the NextCloud backend)

• Observability and Monitoring

  • Node exporter (for hardware metrics)
  • Prometheus (metric scraping)
  • Grafana (Visual Dashboard for the Prometheus database)

• Security Practices

1. Network Isolation: Configured two bridge networks (net-frontend and net-backend). Database and metric collection components operate isolated in the backend network.
2. Secure Credential Injection: Sensitive configuration managed locally usin a (.env) file.
3. Principle of Least Privilege: Monitoring containers have no access to or knowledge of the Nextcloud database credentials.

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Diagram

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Deployment Instructions

Prerequisites

• Docker and Docker Compose installed on the host system.
• Local user permissions configured in the docker group.

Step 1: Clone the repository and initialize variables

Clone the project and create your local credentials file from the provided template:

git clone [https://github.com/PedroSaavedraR/Homelab.git](https://github.com/PedroSaavedraR/Homelab.git)
cd Homelab
cp .env.example .env

Note

Edit the (.env) file with your own passwords

Step 2: Assign permissions to the Grafana volume

For security reasons, the Grafana container runs under an unprivileged user (UID 472). It is necessary to grant ownership of the local persistence folder:

sudo chown -R 472:472 ./grafana_data

Step 3: Launch the infrastructure

docker compose up -d

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Available Services

Service	Local URL
Nextcloud	http://localhost:8080
Grafana	http://localhost:3000

Note

To view system metrics immediately, log into Grafana with the credentials configured in your .env file, navigate to Dashboards -> Import, enter ID 1860 (Node Exporter Full), and bind it to the internal Prometheus data source.