Home Server & Automation

Overview

My home automation setup isn’t just about turning lights on and off—it’s a full-scale infrastructure project that applies the same DevOps principles I use professionally. Running on k3s (lightweight Kubernetes), this system demonstrates production-grade architecture patterns in a home environment.

GitHub Repository: m-gora/homeserver

Architecture & Technologies

The platform is built on a modern cloud-native stack:

  • Home Assistant serves as the automation brain, orchestrating all smart home logic
  • Mosquitto MQTT broker handles real-time device communication
  • Zigbee2MQTT bridges Zigbee devices to the MQTT network, eliminating vendor lock-in
  • GitHub Actions Self-Hosted Runners (ARC) enable CI/CD pipelines directly from my home lab

Production-Grade Infrastructure

What makes this setup interesting from an engineering perspective:

Automated Certificate Management - Using cert-manager with Let’s Encrypt to automatically provision and renew SSL certificates, ensuring secure HTTPS access without manual intervention.

Dynamic DNS & IPv6 Tunneling - external-dns automatically creates DNS entries at Cloudflare, which also tunnels IPv4 traffic to my IPv6-only endpoint—a creative workaround for CGNAT limitations that many home networks face.

GitOps Workflow - Infrastructure as code principles with version-controlled configurations, making the entire setup reproducible and maintainable.

Automated Dependency Management - Renovate continuously monitors container image versions and automatically opens pull requests when updates are available, keeping the cluster secure and up-to-date with minimal manual intervention.

Planned Enhancements

An interesting idea I explored was integrating Google Tasks with the GitHub workflow—automatically creating tasks in my calendar whenever Renovate opens a pull request for review. While the concept would provide better visibility into pending updates, the implementation overhead didn’t justify the marginal gains.

However, since Home Assistant already has both GitHub and Google Tasks integrations built-in, this might be worth revisiting. Leveraging existing integrations could achieve the same goal with significantly less setup effort—a good reminder that sometimes the best architecture is the one that uses what’s already there.

Real-World Integrations

Currently managing several device ecosystems:

  • Thermostatic Radiator Valves (TRVs) for intelligent room-by-room heating control
  • Terrarium automation with coordinated lighting schedules, heating control, and automated rain pump system
  • Roborock vacuum integrated for scheduling and zone-based cleaning

Why This Matters

This project showcases the ability to take enterprise-grade DevOps practices—Kubernetes orchestration, automatic certificate management, DNS automation, CI/CD pipelines—and apply them to solve real problems in a resource-constrained environment. It’s a practical demonstration of infrastructure skills that scales from home labs to production cloud deployments.

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