Always on

Polaris

A self-hosted homelab that never sleeps.

🔒 source is private · happy to walk through it

The story

Polaris is a self-hosted Debian homelab running Docker, with Pterodactyl game servers, Discord bots and team tools. It has zero open ports (Cloudflare Tunnel + Tailscale), self-healing networking, monitoring with alerts, and nightly backups with an off-box copy.

Highlights

Zero open ports: public services go out through a Cloudflare Tunnel (even behind carrier-grade NAT), and admin tools stay on Tailscale with real TLS
Self-healing: a watchdog recovers the network if it hangs, an external heartbeat raises an alarm, and health checks post to Discord
Nightly automated backups with an off-box copy, security-only auto-updates, and graceful shutdowns so game worlds always save
Infrastructure as code: every compose file, script, and config is versioned in git with a written runbook, and secrets stay out of the repo

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