Raspberry Pi Home Server

I recently soft-bricked my Raspberry Pi docker installation (i.e. I can’t be bothered to keep googling the cryptic error messages), and it was still on Raspbian Stretch which no longer receives support…

So time to reinstall everything on my Raspberry Pi! Might as well document this in case I need to perform disaster recovery.

The audience of this blog is myself in the future.

Hardware

1. A Raspberry Pi.
   • I have a Raspberry Pi 3 Model B Rev 1.2
2. SD card
3. A way to write to SD cards
4. External hard drive with a separate power supply

Burning Image to SD Card

Get the latest “lite” image from https://www.raspberrypi.com/software/

There are many different tools for formatting SD cards. This one happened to work for me on a Windows host machine. https://rufus.ie/en/

Enabling Unsafe SSH

Now, there’s a way to set up the image so that SSH is automatically enabled, but Windows plebs can’t access the filesystem after imaging, so we are SOL.

Booting up for the first time

Connect to a monitor and keyboard and plug it in!

You’ll be prompted to set up a username and password for a non-root account.

ssh

sudo raspi-config

Go to Interface Options -> SSH

Network Config

Now connect the ethernet (if you haven’t already)

Go to your Router and look for something like “DHCP Reservation”. Assign an IP like 192.168.1.201

Enabling Safe SSH

First, add a ssh client public key to ~/.ssh/authorized_keys

ssh <username>@192.168.1.201
sudo vi /etc/ssh/sshd_config

Set

PasswordAuthentication no

Docker

curl -fsSL https://get.docker.com -o get-docker.sh
sudo sh get-docker.sh
rm get-docker.sh
sudo usermod -a -G docker <username>
sudo systemctl enable docker
sudo apt-get install -y uidmap
dockerd-rootless-setuptool.sh install
systemctl --user enable --now dbus

Then relogin in. Confirm success with a docker ps and docker run hello-world

Docker Compose

This turned out more complicated than I expected.

Credits to elalemanyo@dev.to

sudo apt-get install libffi-dev libssl-dev
sudo apt install python3-dev
sudo apt-get install -y python3 python3-pip

pip3 install docker-compose

External Hard Drive

sudo mkdir -p /path/to/hard/drive
sudo mount /dev/sda2 /path/to/hard/drive -o uid=<username>,gid=<username>

To mount on startup, first find the uuid of the hard drive

lsblk -f

Then edit the file system table, /etc/fstab, and add:

UUID=<UUID> /path/to/hard/drive ntfs defaults,noatime,nofail 0 2

Docker Containers

Remember to use image for the right architecture for your Raspberry Pi model. For my model, it’s arm64v8¹.

linuxserver.io has a lot of community maintained images for popular server software.

I keep all my docker-compose files on the hard drive, which makes the docker images below even easier to recover.

Set PUID and GUID to your non-root user, probably 1000, but you can check using

id -u <username>

restart: unless-stopped allows these containers to be restarted on host startup

ddclient

---
version: "2"
services:
  ddclient:
    image: linuxserver/ddclient:arm64v8-latest
    container_name: ddclient
    environment:
      - PUID=1000
      - PGID=1000
      - TZ=Europe/London
    volumes:
      - /path/to/hard/drive/ddclient/config:/config
    restart: unless-stopped

Transmission

---
version: "2"
services:
  transmission:
    image: linuxserver/transmission:arm64v8-2.94-r1-ls14
    container_name: transmission
    environment:
      - PUID=1000
      - PGID=1000
      - TZ=America/Los_Angeles
    volumes:
      - /path/to/hard/drive/transmission/config:/config
      - /path/to/hard/drive/transmission/downloads:/downloads
      - /path/to/hard/drive/transmission/watch:/watch
    ports:
      - 9091:9091
      - 51413:51413
      - 51413:51413/udp
    restart: unless-stopped

Plex

---
version: "2"
services:
  plex:
    image: linuxserver/plex:arm64v8-1.32.2
    container_name: plex
    network_mode: host
    environment:
      - PUID=1000
      - GUID=1000
      - TZ=America/Chicago
    volumes:
      - /path/to/hard/drive/media:/mnt/media
    restart: unless-stopped