Tailscale’d Into Homelabbing

A developer shares how Tailscale eliminated the main barriers to starting a homelab — dynamic IPs, remote access, NAT traversal, and TLS certificates. Using an old Lenovo machine as a server, the setup uses Caddy as a reverse proxy with Tailscale integration, and Docker Compose for each service. Apps covered include Vaultwarden for password management, Immich for photo syncing with face recognition, Nextcloud for file sync, and Obsidian with the Remotely Save plugin for cross-device note-taking via WebDAV. Local-first software was a key requirement to handle server downtime gracefully. Apps tried but abandoned include Kavita, Ghostfolio, and Joplin.