I built a one-command home server setup tool because my friends kept saying "I want one of those"

Every time I show someone my homelab (Home assistant managing my home, Immich backing up my photos, Vaultwarden storing all my passwords) they say the same thing: "Oh that's so cool, I want one of those."

Then I try to explain how to set it up. Five minutes into talking about Docker Compose files, reverse proxies, and auto-generated secrets, their eyes are already glazing over. It's not that it's impossibly hard. It's that there's a huge setup tax just to get to the fun part.

So I figured I'd pay that tax once, for everyone.

What it does

One command on your home server:

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/moooosik/homelab-starter/main/install.sh | bash

It checks whether Docker is installed (and installs it if not), detects your server's local IP, shows you a scrollable menu of apps to pick from, and then generates a docker-compose.yml + .env with cryptographically secure passwords auto-filled. You never touch a config file. You never copy-paste a password. At the end it prints the URL for every app you installed.

That's it.

52 apps across 13 categories

The catalog covers pretty much everything you'd want to self-host: password managers (Vaultwarden), media servers (Jellyfin, Plex), photo backup (Immich), smart home (Home Assistant), local AI (Ollama + Open WebUI), document scanning (Paperless-ngx), network ad-blocking (Pi-hole), uptime monitoring (Uptime Kuma), and a lot more.

The installer walks you through categories one at a time so you're never staring at a wall of 52 checkboxes at once.

Why existing tools didn't quite fit

I looked at Deployrr and DockSTARTer before building this. They're good projects, but both have friction I wanted to eliminate:

• curl | bash install: homelab-starter ✅ / Deployrr partial / DockSTARTer ❌
• Auto-installs Docker: homelab-starter ✅ / Deployrr ✅ / DockSTARTer ❌
• Auto-generated secrets: homelab-starter ✅ / Deployrr ❌ / DockSTARTer ❌
• Works without Cloudflare: homelab-starter ✅ / Deployrr ❌ / DockSTARTer ✅
• Fully open source: homelab-starter ✅ / Deployrr freemium / DockSTARTer ✅

The "auto-generated secrets" one matters more than it sounds. The single biggest setup mistake beginners make is reusing a weak password across every app they install. homelab-starter just handles it. Python's secrets module generates a unique cryptographic password for every service that needs one, and they all live in a .env file you never have to touch.

It's already being used

I haven't promoted this anywhere yet. 65 people have cloned it so far. That signal (real users finding it through GitHub search, no promotion) is what convinced me it was worth a proper launch post.

What's next

I'm actually about to use this myself. I'm moving soon and migrating my homelab to a more powerful machine, and homelab-starter is how I'm doing the reinstall. It's a good forcing function for eating my own cooking.

Beyond that: more apps in the catalog (requests welcome), a --add flag to add a single app to an existing deployment without regenerating everything, and better first-run error messages for people running on older Raspberry Pi hardware.

Where to find it

GitHub: https://github.com/moooosik/homelab-starter
PyPI: pip install homelab-starter
Ko-fi if it saves you an afternoon: https://ko-fi.com/moooosik

If you've been meaning to set up a home server but kept putting it off because it seemed complicated — this is the thing I built for you. Give it a try and let me know what apps are missing from the catalog.

And if you find it useful, a GitHub star helps more people find it. ⭐