I used to use Debian’s built in preseeding when I had it all set up, but since rebuilding my homelab, I haven’t set it back up yet.

So I do manually do it, but I have a debian 12 cloud init template that just sets up a debian VM with my SSH keys and the IP’s I want. So this means I don’t have to go through the manual process to install everytime. However I have considerd looking at terraform(or OpenTofu) to do it more IaaC but haven’t had the time or will to dive into that.

I do a lot of my stuff manually because I like to tend and monitor my stuff with my own tools. However I used to use Debian and it seems a lot of people here do/did as well and I recommend that.

I use nixos on proxmox which allows me to boot into a fully configured VM.

Fleet gitops into a k8s cluster provisioned by rancher into harvester.

Network(mikrotik) was done by hand. Installation of harvester by hand/iso, as is initial configuration and deployment of the k8s cluster.

I can deploy all my services into a k8s cluster with fleet. But up to having said cluster is “by hand”. Everything as code in terms of deployments, but Backups of any stateful data (databases, etc) if I’m honest need improvement. I’ve written some stuff to do one off dumps of databases to a NAS but I should automate it.

I have had to rebuild it all from scratch, and other than backup/restore of starteful data was quite happy. All applications, config, etc deploys nicely into a fresh cluster.

I recently had to rebuild a proxmox node after a crash (and lack of backups :() so I took the effort to do things like make images with Packer, deploy with Terraform, configure with ansible etc. It was good learning, but honestly, if I have to do it again things will probably be pretty out of date and I’d be better off doing it manually. It’s a great approach if you plan to deploy thing regularly though (more lab rather than over engineered, for home, production).