Building My Raspberry Pi 5 Homelab: 24 Services on a Single Board
I recently finished building out my homelab on a Raspberry Pi 5 (8 GB). It now runs 24 Docker containers covering media management, monitoring, networking, automation, and more. Here is how it came together and what I learned along the way.
Why a Raspberry Pi?
The 8 GB model hits a sweet spot: enough RAM for serious workloads, low power consumption (under 10W), completely silent, and cheap enough that failures are not catastrophic. The constraints of a single-board computer also force good architectural decisions – you cannot brute-force your way past limited resources, so every service has to earn its place.
The Stack
All 24 services run as Docker containers managed through Docker Compose. Here is the breakdown by category:
Media and Storage (6 services): Immich for photos, Jellyfin for media streaming, Paperless-ngx for documents, Filebrowser, Syncthing, and Sync-in for file management and synchronization.
Monitoring (8 services): This is where I went deepest. Beszel tracks system metrics with minimal overhead. Uptime Kuma monitors service availability. LoggiFly watches container logs in real-time and sends Telegram alerts. Diun and WUD track Docker image updates. NetAlertX discovers new network devices. Speedtest Tracker keeps historical ISP performance data. ChangeDetection watches external websites for changes.
Networking (2 services): Pi-hole for DNS-based ad-blocking across the whole network, and Cloudflared to create a secure tunnel to Cloudflare – no ports exposed on my router.
Management (3 services): Portainer for container management, Homepage as a dashboard, and Backrest for backup orchestration using Restic.
Automation (2 services): Home Assistant for smart home control and N8N for workflow automation.
Utilities (3 services): Warracker for warranty tracking, iSponsorBlockTV for blocking sponsors on smart TVs, and Kaneo for project management.
Key Decisions
The most impactful decision was choosing Cloudflare Tunnel over a traditional reverse proxy like nginx or Traefik. With a tunnel, zero ports are open on my router. Cloudflare handles SSL, WAF, DDoS protection, and geo-restriction for free. The trade-off is a dependency on a third-party service, but for a home setup the security benefits are substantial.
I also split storage across two tiers: the SD card handles the OS while a 1 TB external SSD stores all data (databases, media, configs). SD cards have limited write cycles, so keeping heavy I/O on the SSD extends the life of the boot drive and improves performance.
For monitoring, I deliberately chose multiple specialized tools instead of a single all-in-one solution. Each tool does one thing well, and together they cover system metrics, service uptime, log analysis, and container updates. Every alert goes to Telegram, which is free, reliable, and delivers instant push notifications.
Lessons Learned
RAM is the real bottleneck. On an 8 GB Pi, you have to be selective about what runs. I learned to check each service’s memory footprint before deploying and to set resource limits in Compose files.
Monitor your monitoring. LoggiFly catches issues in other services before they escalate. Having alerts on alerts sounds redundant, but it has saved me more than once.
Secrets management from day one. I made the mistake of committing secrets to git early on. Now all secrets live in .env files that are gitignored, and a sanitization script runs before every commit to catch any leaks. Git history was cleaned with git-filter-repo.
Start simple, add complexity. Each of the 24 services was added one at a time. I got each one working reliably before moving on. This incremental approach made debugging much easier than deploying everything at once.
What is Next
I am planning to explore k3s (lightweight Kubernetes) to learn container orchestration beyond Compose. I also want to add Prometheus + Grafana for deeper metrics visualization, automated testing for compose files, and Terraform for managing Cloudflare configuration as code.
For the full service list, architecture details, and configuration, check out the project page or the GitHub repository.