Turn an old laptop into a self-hosted platform with Docker, Coolify, Tailscale, CoreDNS, Traefik, Prometheus, Grafana and Restic.
From my school days I still have an old Surface Book 3 lying around. Right now it is only gathering dust, but with a few tweaks it can become my own HomeLab server — a permanent, always-on machine I fully control.
Surface Book 3
In this story we will turn that laptop into a small but complete platform: a place to deploy side projects, reach them from anywhere under real hostnames, watch what the machine is actually doing, and back everything up automatically.
By the end you will be able to:
Host your own services on hardware you own
Reach the server from anywhere over a private VPN, without opening a single router port
Deploy from Git with a self-hosted PaaS (Coolify)
Resolve your own *.homelab names with CoreDNS
Route every service through one central Traefik reverse proxy
Monitor the machine with Prometheus and Grafana
Take automated, versioned backups with Restic
The guiding idea, which becomes importa
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