Home Server: Install Docker, Portainer and Home Assistant on Proxmox | the smarthome book (2023)

Recently, I've been looking for a small, low-power machine that I can use as a small media server. I am currently abroad, so I was looking for a lightweight device that I can easily move around, but also has enough power to run and distribute media at home. Beelink was kind enough to send me one of their units to play. I also wanted to do a full home server setup tutorial to make it a perfect fit. In this post I will review the Beelink GK Mini that was sent to me and then we will set it up as a home server. By the end of this post, you will have a small and efficient server running, Proxmox, Home Assistant, Docker and Portainer. Let us begin.

Beelink GK Mini

Beelink sent me this device directly and it seems to fit the bill. It arrived well packaged in the mail and the packaging felt premium, almost like an apple if you will. My device had 8 GB of RAM and a 256 GB m.2 drive. It has two full-size HDMI ports (Intel HD Graphics 600 GPU) and both support h.265 and VP9 video playback at resolutions up to 4K. The specs are below, and the product page ishere.

• Processor: Intel Celeron J4125 (Gemini Lake)
• Red: Gigabit / WiFi 802.11b/g/n/ac, 2,4 + 5,8 GHz
• Memoria: 8GB
• Storage: 128/256/512 GB m.2 and space for an SSD in the socket of the device.
• Connections: 4* USB 3.0, 1* 1000 LAN, 2* HDMI (full size), audio jack (headphone+microphone)
• Power supply: DC input (12 V / 2 A)
• Size: 115mm*102mm*43mm, less than 300g

In the box, in addition to the device and power supply, we have a mounting plate for VESA mounting, a user manual, and a pair of HDMI cables. Once short and once long. We also have a small bag of spare screws/drive.

When you first pick up the device, it's hard to describe how light it feels. It's plastic, but it doesn't feel cheap. I took some photos together with my 6th generation Intel Nuc. While both have a small form factor, the Beelink is smaller and significantly lighter.

I took a quick look under the hood, so to speak. At the base of the device you can add an SSD. I was pleasantly surprised to see a heat sink used on the sata m.2 drive.

I plugged in the machine and turned it on. The power button gave a satisfying click when pressed. Within moments, I stumbled upon the Windows 10 settings page. A few minutes of refusing to be tracked and refusing to use Cortana and we were in business. The GK mini was operational and connected to my WLAN. The machine came with Windows 10 Pro, although that was not the operating system I intended to use with it. I used a quick script to extract the Windows license key (to add it to my collection) from the install and shut down the computer. It was time to give this small entity a new operating system.

Instalar Proxmox

I went with Proxmox on this build because I was in the moodnot muggedit wouldn't work as well on the hardware and it would be a bit of a waste. I wanted to use a bare metal hypervisor and I wanted the simplicity of Docker and Portainer and the ability to run a (supervised) Home Assistant virtual machine. To install Proxmox, we had to download the ISO and flash it onto a USB drive.

I downloaded the latest version of Proxmoxhere. I chose the Proxmox VE 7.0 installer ISO.

Then it was time to downloadblotterto flash the old ISO to the USB drive. I usuallychocolatyto achieve this (saves me a lot of time).

In a few moments we were done. Select your ISO and destination disk (make sure you choose the correct drive!) and start flashing.

Then it was time to go into the BIOS of the Beelink GK Mini to make sure that USB was the first option in the boot order. After turning them on, I repeatedly pressed DEL until I came across the BIOS. There is no air here. Nothing fancy like the NUC's BIOS, but I was surprised at how much configurability was available. There really was an option for everything. Virtualization was already on, thank goodness. Once the boot order has been changed. I plugged in the device and rebooted the machine.

I chose to install Proxmox v7.

I accepted the EULA, selected the 256 GB drive as the destination disk, and filled in my regional details (country, time, keyboard, etc.). Enter your email address and set a strong password (which will be used to access the machine). Then I had to name the machine. Thanks to dhcp, the IP address, gateway and DNS were already populated. Remember to reserve this IP address on the side of your router to ensure it stays consistent. If you have more than one network port on your computer, be sure to select the correct one above. When it came to naming, I just left it at that.

I confirmed the settings on the next page and within moments was prompted to remove the installation media and restart the computer. Once it was up and running again, I logged in as root (standard user) and used the password we set a minute earlier. When I arrived they greeted me like this:

Next, we are going to update it to the latest version. The simplest and easiest way to do this was by using shell commands.

Click on your computer (pve in my case) and then on the shell icon. Next, we must execute the following commands:

nano/etc/apto/Quellen.liS t

I copied and pasted the existing content:

Ctrl O and Ctrl X when done. Next command:

nano /etc/apt/Quellen.list.d/pve-enterprise.liS t

I modified my file to look like this (note the # at the beginning).

Ctrl O and Ctrl X to save and exit.

apt-get update

apt dist-update

restart

Your device should now be fully up to date. You'll still see the disclaimer about not having a subscription, but you can ignore it.

To verify this, click on Updates and click on the update window.

When you're done, close it. You shouldn't see anything listed to update. If there is something there, just click update and you should be fine.

At this point, you have a fully up-to-date and working proxmox installation. What else can we do with it?

create a container

I'm a big fan of Docker and Portainer for managing the different containers. Docker is something Unraid does very well, but that doesn't mean we can't enjoy something similar here. Let's install Docker on top of an LXC container. Return to the shell window and type:

pveam update

This command essentially updates the list of templates we can choose from when creating a container. We need a template on which to base our container. Click Local Storage on the left and then CT Templates on the right.

You'll see a button above that says Templates. Click on it.

For our template, we'll be using turnkey-core, which is basically a very lightweight version of Linux that should help keep the container fast and relatively lightweight. Find the kernel and download it. It will be downloaded to your server's template database. Remember, if you find you only have a few templates to choose from, make sure you've run thempveam updateCommand previously in the shell.

Now that we have ourskey ringTemplate downloaded, let's move on.

Click onCreate TC(Container) top right.

I don't want to go through all the options as things like CPU (cores etc), memory and storage are pretty self explanatory. I'll cover the main points...

You must provide identification to your container. Your node (server) should be preloaded. Add credentials as needed.

Select the template you downloaded earlier.

For the following tabs I chose 100 GB, 1 CPU, 2048 GB memory.

For the network I set it to DHCP and for DNS I left it as default (handled by the host).

My confirmation screen looked like this:

Click "Finish" and you are almost done. Next, we need to click on the Container Options tab and double click on Features. We need to make sure that "Nesting" and "keyctl" are enabled.

After that, start the container (right mouse button shortcut) and in a few seconds it should be up and running. Log in with the root and password you provided in the General tab above, and you should now have a Linux command prompt ready for the next step. Turnkey installation required. When the installer screens appear, you can skip the first two, but choose to install the third. Once the process is complete and Turnkey is installed, exit with Ctrl+C and then run the following commands as usual:

apt-get update

apt-get update

Depending on the number of updates required, it might make sense to restart the container before proceeding with the Docker installation.

Install docker

In the shell of the container you just created, copy and paste the following commands (for commands 2 and 3, you can paste them as a multi-line command):

apt-get update

apt-get install \
apt-transporte-https \
ca certificates \
curls \
gnupg\
lsb release

curl -fsSL https://download.docker.com/linux/debian/gpg | gpg –dearmor -o /usr/share/keyrings/docker-archive-keyring.gpg**For some reason WordPress doesn't show that Dearmor needs a double hyphen, not even a single one**

eco \
„deb [arch=amd64 firmado-por=/usr/share/keyrings/docker-archive-keyring.gpg] https://download.docker.com/linux/debian \
$(lsb_release -cs) stabilization“ | tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/docker.list > /dev/null

(Video) What's On My Home Server? Storage, OS, Media, Provisioning, Automation

apt-get update

apt-get install docker-ce docker-ce-cli containerd.io

This should have Docker added to your container and installed. To check if it is running, paste the last command:

systemctl-status-docker

If all is well, you should see a screenshot similar to the following (to return to the command line, press Ctrl + C):

So Docker now runs in a very lightweight container. Let's install Portainer so we can manage our Docker containers more easily.

Instalar Portainer

This is very easy. At literally the same shell prompt as above, enter the following command.

Crear volumen Docker portainer_data

This creates a place where we can put our data. Next, we need to download and install the Portainer image from the cloud.

docker run -d -p 8000:8000 -p 9000:9000 –name=portainer –restart=always -v /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock -v portainer_data:/portainer de datos/ wear it

And we're done. The above command will unload Portainer, mount it to your container's IP address: 9000, and set it to always restart. Wait a moment for it to fully download and install, and if you did everything right, you should see the following page:

A few things to keep in mind. You may need to verify the IP address of the container. At the command prompt (container shell) you can type:

ifconfig

You can then reserve that container's IP address in your router's settings. I prefer to do it like this so that the router (in my case mypfsense configuration) has complete visibility into which IP address is assigned to which machine, container, VM, etc. If you prefer to manually specify the IP address on the container, simply click the "Network" tab and double-click the "DHCP" option, set it beforehand and change it as needed.

I immediately took a snapshot of the container with just Portainer and Docker installed, to use as a base in case something went wrong with the installation in the future. This was as simple as selecting Snapshots from the container menu and pressing Take Snapshot!

So, in summary, you can now create LXC containers, download templates, create Docker containers and manage them through Portainer. Let's take a look at Home Assistant.

Install Home Assistant

There are currently many ways to install Home Assistant. Some of the most popular are to run on Docker as a container, create a virtual machine and install it natively as an app, or you can also use Home Assistant as a full operating system (device) and run what is known as "supervised" . We will choose this last option. You don't need to run supervised, you can achieve most with custom containers and installations, but for the purposes of this tutorial, we'll choose the most beginner-friendly ones.

Since we are working with Proxmox today, we need to download and unzip the .qcow2 image we foundhere:

Go to Proxmox and click the Create VM button at the top right. You should already be familiar with the layout, since we've already created a container above. Make sure the container has a unique ID and give it a name.

Next, let's go through the rest of the steps:

Click Finish, but don't start yet. We need to change the .qcow2 disk that we downloaded earlier. Use your favorite SFTP client to move the unzipped .qcow2 file to the root of proxmox. The credentials should be root/password, proxmox ip and port 22.

Then go to the server shell and enter the following command to import the hard drive from the root into the virtual machine you just created:

qm import disk 100 /root/hasos_ova-6.4.qcow2 local-lvm –format qcow2

A few things to keep in mind. In the above command, you may need to change it according to your configuration. My VM has ID 100, so qm importdisk 100. At the time of writing, HA was OS 6.4. If you are downloading a file from Home-Assistant and the file is 6.5 etc, you should change the above command accordingly.

Once you've shipped the disk, you can delete the file in the root directory (I put this infilezilla). Now we need to change the VM configuration to use this disk instead of the existing one. Disconnect the original hard drive using the button above.

After disconnecting, you will see two unused drives. Disk 0, which we've already added but not integrated, and Disk 1, the disk that we just took offline but is still part of the machine. Click on Disk 1 and delete it using the button above. After removing and erasing, Disk 0 remains unused. Click on it and press Add.

Now we need to change the boot order to make sure the VM boots with it (remember to enable it too).

Also, enable QEMU guest agent while you are there in the options panel. If you don't enable it, Home Assistant will still work fine, but it will give an error on startup, so I enabled it in my own opinion to eliminate the error.

And that is. we are done Start the machine and wait a few minutes for Home Assistant to load. If all went well, you should receive this familiar screen after login. You can highlight the console icon on the VM at any time and it will show you the IP address etc.

I immediately took a snapshot as before:

And there you have it. He has run the Supervised Home Assistant on Proxmox, with instant snapshots to return to. You can use the plugins in the VM or use containers in Docker as you wish. Candidates for both would be things like:

• zigbee2mqtt
• zwave2mqtt
• A mqtt broker
• Tasmoadmin
• aspect
• input database
• Knotted

abstract

In short, I am very satisfied with the Beelink GK Mini. It's small, very quiet (not quiet, but by no means annoying), and more than capable of running a home server. The current workload with just a Home Assistant and Portainer VM running is as follows:

As you can see, there is a lot of overhead on the Celeron. I plan to add a 1TB SSD in the next few weeks and build a full Docker stack that will allow me to distribute media around the house and on the go. i will addtail scaleto the server so you can access it on the fly without having to use port forwarding.

a big thank you toBeelinkfor making the device available to me. They have a range of AMD and Intel products that would cover most of your needs. See the whole rangehere.

On the Proxmox side, I know I'm only scratching the surface. We haven't covered additional hard drives, storage arrays, or the myriad other things that Proxmox does well. Consider this a beginner's tutorial! If you have any good ideas on how to continue using Proxmox, please write them down in the comments below or visit our Facebook group for more information.

https://www.facebook.com/groups/386238285944105

If you are considering a renovation and looking for structured cabling or just want to support the blog, check out my smart home belowBook, it's available everywhere (paperback too)!

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