Overview
If you've been following my homelab experiments, you know I love to make things reproducible, self-healing, and slightly over-engineered for fun. Lately, I've been exploring FluxCD to bring true GitOps vibes to my small k3s homelab.
Here's the story, the why, and the how.
FluxCDWhy GitOps in a homelab?
I run a small (for now!) k3s cluster with a mix of “essential” services (think Prometheus, Grafana, Jellyfin, Homepage) and
random experiments. Up until now, updating deployments was a mix of kubectl apply and hoping I remembered what I changed.
FluxCD changes that by treating Git as the single source of truth. Everything I want running in my cluster lives in a Git repo, and Flux automatically syncs it.
Architecture
The repo structure changed slightly... again, to fit FluxCD. I thought about following the FluxCD official structure, but it seems way too over-engineered for my use-case. Even for me hehe!
.
├── flux-system/ # GitOps
├── infrastructure/ # Cluster-wide setup
│ └── namespaces/
├── monitoring/ # Monitoring stack
│ ├── grafana/
│ ├── prometheus/
│ ├── kube-state-metrics/
│ ├── node-exporter/
│ └── alertmanager/
├── services/ # Running services
│ ├── homepage/
│ └── jellyfin/
└── scripts/ # PlaceholderInstallation
It was quite straight-forward. Install Flux with the official install script, bootstrap it and go. I spent some time fine-tuning the GitHub PAT to make it have just enough premissions, but that was the hardest part, honestly.
Resources
The repository is public and available at github.com/kristiangogov/homelab. Feel free to explore the manifests, open issues with suggestions, or reach out if you're building something similar!