---
title: Home-ops community
description: The homelab GitOps repositories whose layout this one follows, and where it deliberately differs.
weight: 30
icons: [flux, cncf]
tags: [home-ops, gitops, community]
---

Before this stack existed, other people had published theirs. The home-ops community
is the loose group that keeps a cluster at home and every decision in a public
repository: [onedr0p/home-ops](https://github.com/onedr0p/home-ops) with its
[cluster-template](https://github.com/onedr0p/cluster-template) for Talos plus Flux is
the best-known pair, and [k8s-at-home](https://k8s-at-home.com/) was the chart commons
that came before helmforge.

Read three of those repositories and the same layout appears, without anyone
coordinating it.

## Conventions copied here

- **One repository per cluster.** Talos patches, controllers, applications, DNS and
  secret references live in one tree, so a change spanning four layers is one review.
- **Flux plus Renovate.** Flux applies what git says; Renovate opens the version bumps.
- **Image tags are pointers.** `$imagepolicy` setters let automation rewrite the tag;
  nobody types a digest by hand.
- **Secrets are synced, never committed.** An external store plus an operator that
  pulls values into the cluster.
- **Layers, not folders of pods.** Talos, networking, storage, monitoring, apps: the
  same words, in the same order, across repositories written by strangers.

## Where this stack differs

OpenBao instead of the community's secret defaults, because the operator and policy
model were already in use. Zitadel for identity instead of an in-cluster SSO bolt-on.
Rust for this site. NetBird alongside Tailscale, because the cluster spans two sites
and one mesh was not enough.

Deviations are cheap when the rest is shared: the parts I did not invent are the parts
I rarely have to debug.