How to document your homelab (before future-you regrets it)

Every homelab reaches the same moment: something breaks at 11pm, and the only map of your network is in your head. Six months of container sprawl, a reverse proxy rule you don't remember writing, and a VPN tunnel that apparently matters. This is a guide to documenting the whole rack in about twenty minutes — and keeping the documentation alive afterwards.

Why diagrams beat wikis for homelabs

A homelab is a graph: services, hosts, tunnels and DNS records pointing at each other. Prose describes graphs badly. A diagram is one — and when it's built from real technology icons (Docker, Traefik, Plex, Pi-hole, WireGuard, TrueNAS, Home Assistant), you can read the whole topology at a glance.

Step 1 — inventory the layers

Don't start by drawing. List four layers first:

• Hardware — the machines: NAS, mini-PCs, Raspberry Pis, the router.
• Platform — what runs services: Docker hosts, Proxmox nodes, a k3s node.
• Services — the things you actually use: media server, *arr stack, Home Assistant, Pi-hole, Vaultwarden.
• Ingress — how traffic reaches them: reverse proxy, VPN tunnel, DNS.

Step 2 — sketch the graph

In Stack Sketch, press ⌘K and search the icon for each item on your list — the library covers 640+ real technologies, so your Traefik node looks like Traefik, not a gray rectangle. Drag edges for the paths that matter operationally: what talks to what, and what depends on what. Two useful conventions:

• Solid edges for request paths (phone → WireGuard → Traefik → Jellyfin).
• Dashed edges for dependencies (everything → Pi-hole for DNS).

If drawing from scratch feels slow, describe your rack in a sentence to the AI generator ("Proxmox host running Docker with Traefik in front of Jellyfin, Sonarr and Home Assistant, WireGuard for remote access, Pi-hole for DNS, TrueNAS for storage") and edit what it drafts. Generation runs in your browser with your own API key — your infrastructure map never passes through anyone's servers.

Step 3 — make it the source of truth

Documentation dies when updating it is a chore. Two habits keep it alive:

1. Share the live link, not a screenshot. A published Stack Sketch link renders the current canvas — update the diagram and every bookmark shows the new topology. Pin it in your homelab notes or dashboard.
2. Edit at change time. New container? Add the node while the compose file is still open. The diagram autosaves; there is no save button to forget.

Step 4 — export for the places links can't go

Drop a PNG into your wiki or a README, or export JSON and commit it next to your compose files — the diagram versions with the infrastructure it describes, and re-imports whenever you need to edit.

That's the whole system: one canvas, real icons, a live link, and a 20-minute habit that future-you — squinting at a dead dashboard at 11pm — will be very grateful for. Start with the free tier (10 diagrams, no card) or try it without an account in the sandbox.