Keeping your Homelab Organised

So the main theme of this post will be a self hosted notes app. Leaving notes for yourself and having a list of things you want to accomplish within your homelab are two things I find quite important and have proven useful on countless occasions. There's nothing saying you couldn't also use this for other notes as well outside of your homelab.

My Choice

For a long time I ran Obsidian however keeping notes synced up with all of your devices can prove a bit of a pain. Of course you can pay them to run a sync service for you but you still have to run an app on each of your devices regardless and it ruins the self hosted aspect. These little frustrations had me start looking at something web-based. That way the notes wouldn't need syncing all over the place as they would just exist on my server that hosts the web app.

This is where I came across Memos. It ticks all the boxes. Easy to run and maintain, lightweight, looks good on both mobile and desktop and has writing features such as checkboxes and codeblocks etc.

Setup

I run this in Kubernetes however if you're looking for a simpler approach you can run it in Docker. Here is the Docker compose which you can also find in their documentation here.

version: "3.8"
services:
  memos:
    image: neosmemo/memos:stable
    container_name: memos
    restart: unless-stopped
    volumes:
      - ~/.memos/:/var/opt/memos
    ports:
      - 5230:5230

By default it utilises a SQLite database which I haven't ran into any issues with whilst running this for the past month or so however they do offer other database options which you can check out here.

Initial Setup

Upon first launch you'll want to navigate to http://serverip:5230 - once there you'll be prompted to create your user account.

Once created, you'll be logged in. That's pretty much all you need to start writing notes. If you're curious, this is what the interface looks like...

Examples

Here's some test notes I've written to show the different writing features off...

Then here is how it looks on mobile...

Final Thoughts

I think this is a really nice simple approach to a notes app. It has all the features you want without being too much. Let me know if you end up using this yourself and what you think of it.