Ci-Cd

TL;DR I moved every private homelab repo off GitHub onto a self-hosted GitLab CE 18.10 instance running on my k3s cluster. GitHub stays as a read-only mirror plus the break-glass k3s_bootstrap repo. Two weeks later I accidentally blkdiscard’d the GitLab volume and rebuilt the entire instance from an S3 backup. It worked, but the boring parts — runner re-registration, group tokens, container-registry pull secrets — were the real cost. Why bother GitHub was fine. GitHub Actions was fine. The thing that pushed me over was billing math plus blast radius: ...

TL;DR If you run self-hosted GitHub Actions runners, every actions/cache step is round-tripping to GitHub’s cloud storage. For a homelab cluster with local runners, that means cache restores travel from GitHub’s CDN to your runner, through your ISP, and back – even though the runner is 10 feet from your NAS. I deployed falcondev-oss/github-actions-cache-server as a Kubernetes deployment, pointed it at NFS storage on my NAS, set one environment variable on my runners, and flushed all the GitHub-hosted caches. Zero workflow changes required. ...

TL;DR The blog is deployed by GitHub Actions runners running inside the same k3s cluster it’s talking about. A push to main with content under hugo/ triggers a build, a two-pass S3 sync, and a CloudFront invalidation. A daily 06:00 UTC cron handles future-dated posts so I can commit a backlog and let them drip out on schedule. After every successful deploy, a Playwright job kicks off and scans the live site for broken links, visual regressions, and security header compliance. The whole thing runs on eight self-hosted amd64 runners managed by GitHub’s Actions Runner Controller (ARC) in the cluster. Not a single managed CI minute gets billed. ...

TL;DR AWS ECR tokens expire every 12 hours. Every time the cron job that refreshes the pull secret fails, image pulls break cluster-wide. Docker Hub’s anonymous rate limit (100 pulls/6 hours) started hitting during CI builds that pull nginx:alpine and python:3.12-slim. I replaced both with self-hosted Harbor for container images and Gitea for package registries (PyPI, npm), backed by NFS on the NAS, deployed via Ansible and Helm, with Trivy vulnerability scanning on push. Thirteen CI workflows were updated in a single commit. Pull secrets never expire. Images never rate-limit. Monthly ECR cost drops to zero. ...