Homelab Hardening Guide¶
Why This Guide Exists¶
The name "Homelab Hardening Guide" was chosen deliberately to distinguish this project from traditional enterprise hardening approaches since homelab setups differ greatly in terms of their structure. A lot of the existing documentation, blogs, and discussion around system security is written with corporate environments in mind — with dedicated security teams, centralized management, and strict compliance requirements. Homelab environments, on the other hand, are typically personal learning platforms, hobby projects, or small-scale self-hosted services, often assembled from diverse hardware and software choices. As a frequent lurker in self-hosting communities, forums, and subreddits, I noticed the same questions about “how to secure my setup?” come up repeatedly. This guide aims to address some of those concerns directly, focusing on practical, achievable hardening techniques suitable for home environments — without the complexity or overhead of enterprise-level solutions.
What this Guide is and what it is not trying to be¶
This guide should be seen as a collection of best practices rather than a collection of technical documentation. Although the maintainers of this project do their best to provide technical documentation in some form, the scope is too large to ensure that the technical documentation is always up to date everywhere. As everywhere else, it is therefore advisable to do your own due-diligence before implementing anything.
Info
This guide does not claim to be complete. Furthermore, home lab setups can vary greatly, making it difficult to give general recommendations on what a secure environment should look like. However, there are recommendations that can contribute significantly to the security of your own setup. If you feel like there is something significantly missing in this guide, feel free to suggest changes via pull request.
A word or two about security and complexity¶
It’s important to recognize that security does not automatically improve by adding more tools, layers, or technologies. Each additional component increases the overall complexity of a system, and complexity tends to introduce new risks — misconfigurations, unexpected interactions, and operational overhead. A simpler system is often a more secure system, because it is easier to understand, monitor, and maintain.
Quote
Complexity is the Worst Enemy of Security - Bruce Schneier
Requirements¶
Before applying the recommendations in this guide, ensure that you have:
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Basic Technical Understanding
You should be comfortable using the command line and editing configuration files. -
A System Running GNU/Linux
The examples and guidance in this guide are tailored to Linux-based homelab environments.