Inside the Homelab: The Pi Stack Behind cheesecaked.tech
Everything on this site — the games, the study tools, the media services, this devlog — runs off homelab hardware, not a cloud provider. It's a Docker Compose stack of small, single-purpose containers rather than one monolithic app, which keeps any one piece easy to rebuild if it breaks.
What's actually running
- A web/app container serving the site and its PHP endpoints
- Media services for streaming and library management
- A monitoring stack for keeping an eye on the hardware itself
- A handful of small proxy/utility containers for things like the in-browser Linux practice terminal
Login is Google OAuth plus a magic-link email option, both backed by short-lived, single-use, server-verified sessions rather than anything trusting the browser. None of the account data lives anywhere web-accessible.
What breaks
Consumer-grade hardware serving a public site means things do break — containers get rebuilt, configs get tuned, and backups exist because they've occasionally mattered. That's the honest version of "homelab" instead of the polished one.
Why bother
Running the infrastructure is itself the practice — the same skills the games are trying to teach. If something's going to be misconfigured, better it's a homelab than production at work.