I've tried for 15 years to have my homelab, but always get lost in the complexity after a year or so, in the past. About 3 years ago I gave NixOS a try instead for managing everything, which suddenly made everything easier (counter-intuitively perhaps) as now I can come back after months and still understand where everything is and how it works after just reading.

Setting up Forgejo + runners declaratively is probably ~100 lines in total, and doesn't matter I forget how it works, just have to spend five minutes reading to catch up after I come back in 6 months to change/fix something.

I think the trick to avoid getting tired of it is trying to just make it as simple as humanly possible. The less stuff you have, the easier it gets, at least that's intuitive :)

> When I’ve been fixing broken systems at work all day I don’t really want to have to be my own sysadmin too.

There’s only one solution to this.

Quit your job.

With the help of coding agents it's easier than ever. Just get Claude/Codex to create Helm Charts / Docker Compose files for you. Struggle with some command line juggling to fix some obscure error? An agent can mostly help you in no-time.

There isn't much work or maintenance to do really. When you are the sole user everything is over sized and if it is only accessible at home you can be lazy with updates and security anyway.

> You didn't happen to find anything to simplify the deployment process here, did you?

No, unfortunately not, the Windows VM setup + Forgejo Windows runner was the most painful thing for me to setup, no doubt. It's just such a hassle to reliably set things up, even getting logs out of it was trouble... To be fair, my Mac Mini was manually setup at first, then I have Nix on top of it, while Windows I've 100% automated it, so not entirely fair comparison, automating the Mac Mini setup would be similarly harsh I think. But it's a mix-match of Nix for configuring the VM and booting it, XML files for "autounattend" setup, ps1 bootstrapping scripts and .cmd script for finalizing, a big mess.

Forgejo 15 was just released last week with repo-specific access tokens. More to come in the future.

I use https://github.com/garethgeorge/backrest to manage nightly encrypted backups of my Forgejo instance to a Hetzner Storage Box. <$4/mo for 500GB of storage. It's also where I back up my Immich library to.

Immich automatically dumps its DB every day, for Forgejo I have a little script that runs as part of the Backrest backup that does a pgdumb of the database before doing the backup.

It works great, I even had to do disaster recovery on it once and it went smooth.

There is a fairly straightforward feature in Forgejo to sync your repos to Github, if that's what you want to do. It's not perfect, of course, but should help to advertise your projects and keep your activity heatmap green.

I mostly use Forgejo for my private repos, which are free at Github, but with many limitations. One month I burned all my private CI tokens on the 1st due to a hung Mac runner. Love not having to worry about this now!

> If you don't appear active on GitHub specifically... you're going to get dismissed from a lot of job applications

Sometimes wonder if my coursemates back in the days, who automated commits to private repos just to keep the green box packed, actually got any mileage out of it.

I get that. To counter it I usually try to have at least one public repo on my Forgejo instance and link to that on my resume/LinkedIn. It helps that I'm angling for security/infra positions so the self-hosting aspect actually helps but even without that I would imagine it signals something. Maybe not ideal for the most mainstream jobs (whatever that even means...), but I suspect some people will be intrigued by the initiative.

Edit: to the "do you even lift bro", the response becomes "yeah man, I've built my own gym - oh, you go to Planet Fitness? Good luck."

Fine with me. Not the type of jobs I want anyway.