Home Lab and Blog Update

I haven’t posted in a while because I’ve been busy working on my home lab and updating my blog to look the way I wanted.

The first thing I did was set up the Stack theme for Hugo. This required some configuration changes as well as learning how to convert between YAML and TOML for Hugo configurations. I used this tool to help with the conversions.

I also set up a personal Docker installation of n8n within my home lab. I want to experiment with it alongside local LLMs for processing personal data that I don’t want uploaded to the cloud. Currently, I’m using LM Studio to run local LLMs and have it communicate with my n8n installation.

One key learning was the use of Docker command line parameters during container startup to configure settings such as ports. For example, I created a Docker volume to store data files:

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docker volume create n8n_data

Then, I ran the container with the following command:

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docker run -it --rm --name n8n -p 5678:5678 -e N8N_SECURE_COOKIE=false -v /home/user/n8n:/home/node/files -v n8n_data:/home/node/.n8n docker.n8n.io/n8nio/n8n

Note: The configuration N8N_SECURE_COOKIE=false is necessary in my lab environment since I access the service via my home network rather than localhost.

To share custom folders between my home network and the Docker container, I mapped a host directory to the container’s /home/node/files directory that i had to create. Specifically, I created the /home/user/n8n folder on the host, then linked it to the container directory. To ensure that any machine on my network could access this shared folder, I set up a shared drive on my NAS. I created a share named n8n and mounted it to /home/user/myn8n on the host using:

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sudo mount //NASIP/NASSHARENAME/n8n /home/user/myn8n -o username=user,file_mode=0777,dir_mode=0777

At the moment, I can send file information to a local LLM and receive its feedback. I configured LM Studio to point to my locally hosted LLM instance, completing the integration.

The next step in this journey is to dive deeper into n8n nodes and leverage them for more effective automation in my personal projects.