RackPeek: Home Lab Documentation Tool

RackPeek is a web UI and CLI tool engineered for documenting and managing home lab and small-scale IT infrastructure. It is designed to help you track hardware, services, networks, and their relationships in a clear, scriptable, and reusable way—without the bloat of enterprise tools, without proprietary lock-in, and without drowning in metadata or process overhead. The project banner and branding foreground a focus on practicality and approachable self-hosted management, signaling a tool built for people who want clarity and control over their own networks and devices.

Version and status badges convey a steady, production-ready stance. The project is at Version 1.3.0, with a Status badge that marks RackPeek as Stable and ready for ongoing use. The presence of these badges, alongside links to community channels and live demonstrations, invites users to explore how RackPeek fits into their home-lab workflows and to verify its readiness in their own environments.

To foster community engagement and shared learning, RackPeek offers a direct invitation to join its Discord community. The Discord badge links to a community server where users can discuss features, share setups, and help each other troubleshoot. This emphasis on openness and collaboration aligns with the project’s core values and its mission to stay approachable for hobbyists and professionals alike.

For those who want to see RackPeek in action before spinning up their own instance, there is a Live Demo badge that points to an online demonstration. This allows potential users to explore the interface and see how the tool lays out hardware inventories, service maps, and relationships in a tangible, navigable form.

Docker-based deployment is highlighted with a Docker Hub badge, reinforcing the self-hosted nature of the project and offering a convenient path for users who want to pull a ready-made image and start experimenting quickly.

RackPeek is positioned as a practical tool for documenting and managing home-lab infrastructure, with a design aim to make the process of inventorying hardware, services, and networks straightforward. It supports not only the data collection and representation of a local environment but also the scripting and reuse of that data. Users can model relationships—how devices connect to services, which networks tie together, and where dependencies lie—without being confronted by extraneous, enterprise-centric metadata or convoluted processes.

The project’s demo media, including a RackPeek demo GIF and a web UI demonstration GIF, illustrate the software in action. These visuals give potential adopters a sense of the flow from adding devices to visualizing connections across networks and services. They demonstrate how a home lab’s landscape can be mapped into a coherent, navigable map that is both human-readable and machine-friendly.

In practice, RackPeek is built to be both approachable and scriptable. The web UI provides an accessible entry point for inventories and relationships, while the CLI offers a lean path for automation, batch updates, and reproducible configurations. The emphasis on open, non-proprietary data formats means you can inspect, migrate, or reuse your own data without being locked into a vendor-specific representation. There are no telemetry hooks or advertising constraints; what runs on your infrastructure stays on your infrastructure, preserving privacy and control.

A central element of RackPeek’s architecture is its state storage. RackPeek stores its state in YAML, enabling human-readable configuration that is easy to version control and diff. The typical on-disk layout is a config directory containing a YAML file, such as config.yaml. This approach aligns with the project’s openness and simplicity ethos: you can edit the configuration directly, reconstruct a system from scratch, or migrate data between environments with minimal friction.

To help you get started, the project provides practical guidance for running RackPeek with Docker. There are two common approaches:

• Named volume approach: create a persistent config volume and run the container with a repository-wide configuration mounted into the container. This keeps configuration and state outside the container, simplifying upgrades and backups.
• Bind mount approach: mount a local config directory into the container, enabling quick iteration during development or testing on a workstation.

In both cases RackPeek exposes its web UI on port 8080, making it easy to reach the interface from a browser once the container is up and running. The YAML-based storage means that the user’s inventory—comprising hardware, services, networks, and the relationships among them—persists across restarts and container updates, preserving the integrity of the documented environment.

The documentation section of RackPeek is thorough and approachable. It points users to an overview, an installation guide, and an Ansible inventory generator guide, in addition to a CLI commands reference and a versioning page. Together these resources provide a clear path from initial setup and onboarding to ongoing maintenance and evolution of the documentation model. For someone evaluating RackPeek, the docs present a comprehensive map: you can understand the high-level aims, learn how to install and deploy, extend with automation, and keep track of how the project evolves over time.

The project’s governance and development culture are reflected in its Development Docs. There are clear guidelines for contribution, a cheat sheet for development and release processes, and testing guidelines to shape how new ideas are proposed, built, and validated. This commitment to openness and community contribution is reinforced by the core values that RackPeek articulates: Simplicity, Ease of Deployment, Openness, Community, Privacy & Security, Dogfooding, and Opinionated focus for home labs and self-hosted environments.

Simplicity is at the core of RackPeek. The goal is to deliver a tool that is clear, useful, and free from unnecessary abstraction. By keeping the scope tight and the interfaces direct, RackPeek avoids feature creep that could obscure the essential task of documenting a home lab. This clarity helps users quickly decide how to capture a device, a service, or a network, and how to relate those objects to one another in a way that makes sense for real-world environments.

Ease of deployment is another pillar. The project emphasizes a straightforward path to getting RackPeek up and running, with practical deployment options—particularly Docker-based—so users can stand up a working instance with minimal friction. The accompanying commands and compose examples demonstrate how to secure a persistent configuration, how to map ports, and how to ensure the service restarts reliably in normal operations.

Openness is a foundational value. RackPeek favors open data formats and user ownership of data. YAML for state storage ensures that the configuration remains readable and portable, with the ability to inspect, migrate, or reuse data across tools and workflows. This openness supports interoperability and reduces lock-in, aligning with the needs of hobbyists and small teams who want to assemble a visible map of their infrastructure without being locked into a proprietary ecosystem.

Community is embedded in the project’s culture. The repository points to a Discord community, YouTube videos, and articles by practitioners who discuss documenting homelabs as code. The presence of diverse perspectives—DB Tech’s video on easy documentation, Brandon Lee’s home-lab as-code discussions, and perspectives from Virtualization How-To and Jared Heinrichs—illustrates an ecosystem where users learn from one another and contribute back with real-world use cases. The project invites feedback and participation, positioning RackPeek as a living project shaped by its user base.

Privacy and security are treated with seriousness. RackPeek asserts no telemetry, no ads, no tracking, and no artificial restrictions. What runs on your infrastructure stays on your infrastructure. This stance is vital for home labs and small environments where the user wants full control and visibility over data, without internal telemetry that could drift into policy concerns or data exposure.

Dogfooding—the practice of building a tool to solve the team’s own problems—appears in the project’s narrative. The designers and contributors are motivated by real-world, practical needs: documenting and managing a home lab should be useful in daily life, not a distant theoretical exercise. If a feature does not translate into a tangible, practical benefit, it is considered not useful enough to justify inclusion.

RackPeek is opinionated in its scope and design. It is optimized for home labs and self-hosted environments rather than enterprise CMDBs or corporate documentation workflows. This focus makes it easier for hobbyists and small teams to adopt and adapt the tool to their own contexts without wrestling with inappropriate complexity or features that do not align with their needs.

For developers and operators who want to extend RackPeek, there are clear development resources. The docs include an installation and contribution flow, a development cheat sheet for builds, releases, Docker usage, and testing principles. These materials help ensure that the project remains approachable for new contributors while maintaining a standardized process for improvements and updates.

Because RackPeek emphasizes a transparent, reproducible model of a networked environment, it naturally supports both a hands-on and an automated workflow. The CLI component enables scripted interactions and batch operations, while the web UI makes exploration and visualization intuitive. The YAML-based configuration can be version-controlled alongside other infrastructure-as-code assets, enabling teams to track changes over time, review updates, and roll back configurations if necessary.

The project also acknowledges the importance of feedback in shaping the next wave of features. The Roadmap is actively discussed, inviting voices from the community to prioritize development. This participatory approach ensures that RackPeek evolves in directions that reflect real-world use, addressing the kinds of problems homelabbers encounter, such as inventory drift, dependency mapping, and the need for reusable templates to describe similar devices or services across different environments.

In addition to practical deployment guidance, RackPeek’s content highlights the value of real-world demonstrations and curated examples. The included media—demo GIFs and web UI screenshots—provide a tactile sense of the experience: how a user might load a YAML inventory, view devices and services, and navigate the relationships that tie them together. These visuals can be especially helpful when evaluating how RackPeek would fit into a student lab, a personal project, or a hobbyist’s growing collection of home infrastructure.

RackPeek’s documentation structure is designed to be a living guide. It includes:

• Overview: A high-level map of what RackPeek is and what it can do.
• Installation Guide: Practical steps to get RackPeek up and running.
• Ansible Inventory Generator Guide: A pathway for integrating RackPeek with existing automation workflows.
• CLI Commands Reference: A compact, practical reference for scriptable administration.
• Versioning: A look at how the project evolves over time, including how versions relate to features and compatibility.

For those who want to participate or contribute, the project provides explicit development files and guidelines. A contribution guidelines document outlines how to propose changes and submit pull requests, while a dev cheat sheet covers build, release, Docker, and testing commands. A separate testing guidelines document outlines principles and standards to maintain quality across contributions. This structured approach makes it easier for new contributors to understand how to engage with the project and how to ensure their changes align with the project’s goals.

The proposed feature trajectory for RackPeek’s next wave remains a living conversation. The roadmap invites users to contribute ideas and feedback, ensuring that new capabilities align with real-world needs. In the meantime, the existing feature set already provides a robust framework for documenting home lab assets and their interdependencies. The YAML-based state, the dual access paths via web UI and CLI, and the emphasis on simplicity and openness together form a coherent design that is approachable for beginners while still capable for more advanced users.

If you want to explore RackPeek visually or in action, you can browse the available media and documentation to get a sense of how the interface organizes information. The banner and badges at the top of the page encode not just branding but a readiness to support your setup, your data model, and your personal or small-team workflows. The GIFs and screenshots give a preview of how the library of devices, services, and networks can be laid out and related, making it easier to imagine how a live home lab would look when mapped with RackPeek.

RackPeek’s practical utility is reinforced by concrete examples of how to run it in Docker environments. Two primary approaches are highlighted: a named volume approach and a bind mount approach. In the named-volume approach, you create a Docker-managed volume (for example, rackpeek-config) and run the container with a mount to that volume pointing to /app/config inside the container. This method keeps configuration and state managed by Docker, simplifies upgrades, and facilitates backups. In the bind-mount approach, you map a local config directory to /app/config, enabling quick iteration and easy editing from a host filesystem. The core idea is to ensure that your YAML-based configuration persists reliably and remains accessible outside the container for editing and version control.

A minimal Docker Compose example is provided for those who prefer a repeatable, multi-service deployment model. The Compose file shows a rackpeek service that uses the latest image, maps port 8080, mounts the persistent config, and includes a restart policy. The YAML-centric approach aligns with RackPeek’s emphasis on openness and reproducibility, making it natural for users who already work with Docker Compose in their infrastructure.

Beyond Docker, RackPeek’s documentation covers the broader ecosystem of community resources, tutorial videos, and articles that illustrate how to document a homelab as code. The presence of multiple entry points—videos, articles, and sub-communities—reflects a philosophy of learning by example, where practitioners can share their setups and workflows, compare approaches, and adopt best practices as they evolve.

Finally, RackPeek’s core values translate into practical outcomes. Simplicity helps you avoid overcomplication when cataloging devices and services. Ease of deployment means you can get up and running quickly, test hypotheses, and iterate without heavy friction. Openness ensures that you own your data and can move it wherever you want. Community support provides a safety net and a wealth of real-world experience. Privacy and security ensure that you control what is tracked and where data resides. Dogfooding keeps the project grounded in real problems. An opinionated stance tailors the tool toward home labs and self-hosted environments rather than enterprise-scale CRM-like use cases.

In sum, RackPeek offers a coherent, practical framework for documenting and managing home-lab and small-scale IT ecosystems. It provides a clear path from initial setup to ongoing maintenance, backed by an open data model, a user-friendly web UI and CLI, robust documentation, an active community, and a strong emphasis on privacy and control. The combination of YAML-based state, Docker-ready deployment, and a focused feature set makes RackPeek a compelling choice for anyone looking to bring order, visibility, and reproducibility to a personal or small-team infrastructure.

For readers who want to see more or get involved, the project encourages exploration and participation. The banner, version and status indicators, and community links accompany a practical set of guides and tutorials designed to help you deploy and use RackPeek effectively. The included GIFs demonstrate the dynamic experience of mapping hardware, services, and networks, while the web UI demonstration captures the intuitive navigation and relationship visualization that RackPeek enables. This combination of practical tooling and accessible learning materials makes RackPeek a valuable resource for making homelabs more organized, transparent, and manageable.

Images and media included in the input—such as the RackPeek banner, version and status badges, the Discord join badge, live demo badge, Docker Hub badge, and the RackPeek demo GIFs—are integrated into this description to reflect the visual identity and the demonstrable capabilities of the project. These visuals complement the narrative by offering tangible cues about branding, status, community engagement, and the actual interface you’ll encounter when you begin documenting your own home lab with RackPeek.

If you’re ready to start, you can follow the documented installation and deployment steps, try the live demo to get a feel for the interface, and participate in the community to influence the future direction of RackPeek. The project’s emphasis on simplicity, openness, and user-driven development makes it a practical, accessible, and collaborative tool for anyone who wants to document and understand their home IT environment with clarity and confidence.