Introduction

This is the technical documentation site for my Bachelor’s thesis project at the Haute école de gestion de Genève. The project is titled:

Conception et déploiement automatisé d’un Operating System as Code à l’aide de pratiques Infrastructure as Code.

Main Objective

Manually setting up and maintaining infrastructure can be time-consuming, error-prone, and difficult to reproduce. The aim of this project is to design and automate the deployment of a personal homelab server by applying modern practices like Infrastructure as Code (IaC), GitOps, and DevSecOps. This approach ensures that infrastructure configuration is:


Version-controlled	All changes are tracked in Git and pushed to a remote repository
Reproducible	Systems can be rebuilt reliably from the same source
Maintainable	Make updates and fixes easier to apply and track
Secure	Sensitive data is encrypted and managed properly

What You’ll Find Here

This documentation details the tools, processes, and architecture used to design and deploy a fully automated homelab environment. Specifically, it covers how to:

Build a NixOS-based virtual machine on Proxmox
Configure and manage infrastructure with OpenTofu
Secure secrets using SOPS + age
Automate deployments with GitHub Actions
Run useful services in Docker containers

Services and Architecture

The homelab environment is built on a NixOS virtual machine hosted on a Proxmox hypervisor. This VM provides a platform for deploying and managing several containerized services, including:

Traefik — reverse proxy
Tailscale — private mesh VPN
Uptime Kuma — uptime monitoring
Speedtest Tracker — internet speed monitoring
Dozzle — real-time log viewer
Watchtower — automatic container updates
Homepage — service dashboard
Gotify — notification server

This documentation serves as a technical reference throughout the project and may serve other students or professionals exploring reproducible, code-driven infrastructure design.