🚢 Home DevOps Pipeline: A junior engineer’s tale (4/4)

In this series of articles, I will explain how I built my own home development environment using a couple of Raspberry Pis and a lot of software. The code referenced in these articles can be found here. In this article I will cover the monitoring of my pipeline, as well as discuss a few gotchas.

Monitoring

My initial thought for monitoring uptime of my development pipeline was UpTimeRobot, a free service which pings periodically and if failures alerts via email.

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Example email*

However, being able to monitor and repair your development pipeline in a web app is just great and portainer have really aced this one.

This application is great and many more features than I want to explain. But it allows for inspection of container logs, ssh into containers, and even deployment of new images — controlling and monitoring multiple hosts.

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Portainer running*

To get portainer running I added this to my code docker-compose template:

portainer:

  image: portainer/portainer

  command: -H unix:///var/run/docker.sock

  restart: always

  networks:


homereponet
ports:
9000:9000
8000:9000
volumes:
/var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock
/mnt/hdd/portainer:/data
labels:
"traefik.enable=true"
traefik.backend=portainer
traefik.portainer.frontend.rule=Host:portainer.<domain>
traefik.docker.network=homereponet
traefik.portainer.port=9000

The End

This is where this story ends for now. I think that this is a great starter set up for anyone looking to have a industry style development pipeline. As a recap this final setup is:

Gitea Repository for storing code, using git LFS for large media files. Drone CI to build containers, store them in Docker Registry, and deploy using an Ansible plugin to a local set of machines as well as cloudformation plugin for AWS deployment. Portainer for monitoring and control over containers in a UI. Traefik for a reverse proxy with let’s encrypt free https certificate on a free duckdns domain. All storage is done on a hard drive and there are periodic backups to AWS s3.

I hope you have enjoyed this series of articles. I also make many more projects including other hardware, 3D printing, smart-home applications, and machine learning in video form over at T3chFlicks — check us out.

Appendix

Code: https://github.com/sk-t3ch/home-repo

Random Things I learned along the way:

• Docker-compose has to be controlled inside the same directory as it was started

• policy creation for aws s3 is needed because you only want the pi and the root aws user to be able to access the bucket also add encryption

• need to look more into backup techniques

• s3 backups to glacier after 10 days meaning storage cost stays low

• Raspberry Pi 4 has two usb 3.0 ports and two 2.0 ones.

• Using an EXFAT drive instead of HFS+ resulted in failures for the Postgres container

• ssh on Gitea cannot use port 22 due to permissions problem that i am yet to solve. to work around this i changed the router forward port to allow for an ssh port in the accepted range (1065+)

Contents: 1, 2, 3, (4)

Thanks for reading

I hope you have enjoyed this article. If you like the style, check out T3chFlicks.org for more tech-focused educational content (YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter).