Homelab Atlas: A Self-Hosted Way to Map Out the Homelab My homelab has changed quite a bit over the years, and keeping track of where everything lives isn't always as straightforward as it used to be. A service gets moved to another machine, a new container gets added, and before long, the setup looks nothing like it did six months ago. I usually know where everything is, but trying to explain the whole arrangement to someone else is another story. Homelab Atlas is a self-hosted tool that helps put all of that into a visual diagram. Instead of spending an afternoon drawing boxes and connecting lines, you can add your machines and the services running on them, then let the application do much of the arranging. It's a pretty simple idea, but the finished results look surprisingly good. Putting the Homelab on the Map I've never been particularly excited about making network diagrams. I understand why they're useful, but sitting down with a traditional diagram editor and manually arranging everything isn't exactly how I want to spend my free time. I'd much rather be tinkering with the actual servers. Homelab Atlas makes that process a little more enjoyable. You can create cards for your machines, assign services to them, and have everything arranged into a clean visual layout. It also includes recognizable logos for popular self-hosted applications, which gives the diagrams a much nicer appearance than a bunch of rectangles with text inside them. You can adjust individual cards, add hardware information, and show network connections between devices. That last part could be especially handy for anyone running multiple servers or a collection of mini PCs that have accumulated over time. It's easy enough to remember what's running on a single machine, but once things start spreading across the network, a visual reference becomes a lot more useful. And I'll admit, having a good looking diagram of the homelab is pretty satisfying in its own right. We spend enough time building these things. We might as well have a decent way to show them off. You Don't Have to Enter Everything Manually Homelab Atlas also includes some discovery options that can save you from typing out every service yourself. It can discover Docker containers through an optional collector and identify network devices using Nmap. You can even import results from an existing network scan. I appreciate that discovery doesn't immediately dump everything into your diagram. You review the results and decide what should be included. That's probably for the best, considering how many devices on a typical home network have names that tell you absolutely nothing about what they actually are. It's important to understand that Homelab Atlas isn't trying to be another monitoring dashboard, though. It doesn't constantly watch your containers or automatically update the diagram when something goes offline. This is more about documenting your setup and having a clear picture of how everything fits together. Honestly, I think that's perfectly fine. I've already got enough dashboards telling me what my servers are doing. Sometimes I just want to see where everything belongs. Running Homelab Atlas at Home The developer provides a Docker Compose setup, with container images available for both AMD64 and ARM64 systems. You don't need to configure a separate database, and the basic application works without connecting to any outside service. One detail I would pay attention to is how projects are saved. Homelab Atlas stores your working diagram in the browser, so mounting a Docker volume isn't going to give you the sort of backup you might expect. You'll want to export your project as a JSON file if you plan on keeping it around. You can also export finished diagrams as PNG or SVG images, which makes sharing them pretty straightforward. There's no built-in authentication either, so I'd keep this one on the local network rather than making it publicly accessible. A Good-Looking Homelab Deserves a Good Diagram Homelab Atlas has a really nice appearance for a smaller open-source project. The diagrams are clean without looking overly technical, and the application logos make everything easier to recognize at a glance. I can imagine using an exported diagram in my documentation or pulling one up when explaining how the homelab is arranged. It also doesn't seem interested in becoming some enormous infrastructure management platform, which I find refreshing. It has a fairly specific job, and that's helping you put together a useful picture of your setup without making the process unnecessarily complicated. For anyone whose homelab has grown beyond a single Docker host, I think it's an interesting little project to look into. You can check out the screenshots and Docker installation instructions in the Homelab Atlas GitHub repository. The official documentation has more information about the editor and its discovery features. Homelable: A Visual Map of Your Home Server Setup Homelable brings network discovery, live status checks and diagrams together to help document the machines behind a home server setup. NotedJeremy Explore more on Noted Take a Poll | Play Trivia | Browse Giveaways https://noted.lol/homelab-atlas/ #homelabatlas #way #everything #manuallyhomelab #rss #feeds #linksharing #qwibbit