Homelab — The Ranch

Overview

The Ranch is a k3s cluster built out of three laptops that runs the boring, useful things: replicated file storage, media streaming, and somewhere to train models locally without renting a GPU.

The design decision I actually thought about was the split between services. A shared-folder setup is simplest, a monolith is hard to maintain, and full microservices are more coordination than one person should sign up for. So the cluster is service-oriented: the drive and the music service are independent stacks that happen to live on the same hardware, each with its own API layer, its own Postgres, and its own dedicated Longhorn volume. The point is the failure boundary — the music platform falling over does not take my files with it.

haybale is the drop-box service on top of that, written in Go. The API handles metadata, auth and routing, and hands anything slow to a separate worker over Redis, so thumbnailing and background processing never block an upload. File bytes go to MinIO, metadata to PostgreSQL, and a SvelteKit front end sits over the whole thing. It is packaged with Helm and reachable over Tailscale rather than being exposed to the internet.

Everything else I run ends up here eventually — CareFlow's production database lives on this cluster.