Documentation, Documentation, Documentation!

Recently someone asked on Reddit: “What’s your number one recommended service?”
Everyone could answer this question differently, but my answer was: “Bookstack. Start documentation as soon as possible!”. This is a piece of advice I would give to myself at the very beginning. Of course, working on projects like setting up a media server could be fun, and also you can use it almost immediately. Documentation is something that most of us (me included!) tend to postpone with a plethora of excuses. I thought documentation is useful only when working on big projects, not for a homelab, but you can always find something to write in the documentation. You can write your configurations, detailing the steps to set up your homelab, issues you encountered and how you fixed or dealt with them… the list goes on and on.
Nobody taught me how to write documentation, and I am sure it’s not great, but I am doing my best, and I am keeping track of what I am doing in my homelab.
So, as you probably guessed, I use Bookstack for my documentation. Some people may prefer a Wiki-style application, but I like the idea of having Books, Chapters and Pages, and it’s very easy to use.
I don’t think I need to say that I used docker-compose to set it up, but if you fancy something different you can read the documentation.

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mkdir bookstack
cd bookstack
touch docker-compose.yml
nano docker-compose.yml

docker-compose.yml

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---
version: "2"
services:
  bookstack:
    image: lscr.io/linuxserver/bookstack
    container_name: bookstack
    environment:
      - PUID=1000
      - PGID=1000
      - APP_URL=
      - DB_HOST=bookstack_db
      - DB_USER=bookstack
      - DB_PASS=<yourdbpass>
      - DB_DATABASE=bookstackapp
    volumes:
      - /path/to/data:/config
    ports:
      - 6875:80
    restart: unless-stopped
    depends_on:
      - bookstack_db
  bookstack_db:
    image: lscr.io/linuxserver/mariadb
    container_name: bookstack_db
    environment:
      - PUID=1000
      - PGID=1000
      - MYSQL_ROOT_PASSWORD=<yourdbpass>
      - TZ=Europe/London
      - MYSQL_DATABASE=bookstackapp
      - MYSQL_USER=bookstack
      - MYSQL_PASSWORD=<yourdbpass>
    volumes:
      - /path/to/data:/config
    restart: unless-stopped

Setting up the environment variables is pretty straightforward, just pay attention to match the database passwords.

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sudo docker-compose up -d

Now, if you didn’t read the documentation (naughty!), you can login using [email protected] and password of password.

Go and write your own documentation!