If you saw my earlier post a few weeks back covering Scanopy, you already know there are many different solutions out there that can scan your network and generate diagrams automatically. When you have a tool that will do this, it is a huge step forward. If you have drawn things out manually, you will know the pain I am referring to here. But, there is still a gap. The tools we have today are great at creating a snapshot of your environment. But you don’t necessarily have something that is a “live” look at your environment as it is running and changing. This is where a tool called Homelable feels a bit different. Let’s look at this new tool, what it can do and how you can use it in your home lab environment.
What is Homelable
Homelable is a self-hosted infrastructure visualization tool that lets you build and maintain a visual map of your environment. While it does this, it also fetches real-time status checks to the things you care about in your lab or other environment.
Granted, it is not trying to replace your monitoring stack. It is not trying to replace your documentation either that you may already have in place. I think this solution sits somewhere in between. Real-time checks is the feature that takes Homelable from interesting to genuinely useful.
You can attach health checks to nodes and services using things like ping, HTTP, HTTPS, TCP, SSH, and Prometheus endpoints. With this, your map is not just showing structure. It is showing state. If something goes down, you can see it immediately. If multiple services depend on a component that fails, you can visually trace it. This will be helpful when troubleshooting systems like reverse proxies, container stacks, or distributed storage.
Why visualizing your home lab actually matters
Taking a step back for just a minute, why is visualizing your home lab something that you should view as important? Well, like production environments, as our home lab grows, the hardest part isn’t necessarily building it, but keeping track of it. You start to layer on technologies on top of one another. This includes things like Proxmox nodes, Proxmox Backup Server, virtual machines, containers, storage clusters, reverse proxies, VLANs, and other integrations.
Then, if you have something break, you are not left just trying to trace dependencies across your multiple systems. This is something that slows all of us down. Having a visual map that can reflect the state of your infrastructure when things go sideways is key.
Deploying Homelable in your home lab
Getting started is super simple if you are already running a Docker host in your lab. You can use the container image for Homelable that you can deploy with a minimal Docker Compose configuration. You basically just pull down the install script that unpacks the docker compose file and then you bring the docker compose stack up.
curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Pouzor/homelable/main/install.sh | bash
#Change into the directory it creates
cd homelable
Deploy it with:
docker compose up -d
After that, you can access the interface for Homelable at:
http://your-server-ip:3000The default admin password if you haven’t changed anything in the config is admin/admin.
When you log in for the first time, you will see an example diagram that comes out of the box to give you an idea of what it looks like. Overall, I like the styling with how it represents everything and dark mode by default. You can play around with this default diagram just to get a feel for how things operate which is a nice touch.
Scanning your network
There are a couple of notes regarding scanning your network. You can actually input your network ranges in the .env file that is pulled down with the above command we noted for getting up and running.
# Scanner JSON array of CIDR ranges to scan
SCANNER_RANGES=["192.168.1.0/24"]
# Status checker interval in seconds
STATUS_CHECKER_INTERVAL=60You can also manually add subnets to scan in the Homelable interface. In the lower left-hand corner of the interface, you can click the Scan Network option.
Also, if you click the + Add range button, you can add additional ranges to the same scan so that it scans multiple ranges at once so you don’t have to do these one at a time.
You can see under the Scan History if the scan is still running or if it is completed.
When you click a scan, you will see the checkbox by each node. You can check the box and then add them to the canvas. Below, you can see a few devices that I quickly pulled out of the scan, added, connected them together and I also changed the color of the network connections between them.
The key difference from other tools
I have reviewed and looked at other tools like Scanopy as mentioned earlier. I think the clear difference between this tool and something like Scanopy is that it is a more up to date copy of your nodes as you can set the pings or other checks to be every few seconds if you want. Below, you can see the multiple check methods you can use from ping, http, https, tcp, ssh, prometheus, etc.
If I could compare them this way:
- Scanopy focuses on discovery and automatic diagram generation. It answers the question, “What does my network look like right now?”
- Homelable answers a different question – “What is my infrastructure doing right now, and how does everything relate?”
So, I think with Homelable you are not just creating a diagram and exporting it. You are maintaining a living map of your infrastructure. And you are not stopping at discovery of nodes. You are attaching health checks and status indicators so the map becomes useful in real-time.
That is why the two tools can actually complement each other instead of competing I think if you want to run both. Below, you can see when you click on a node, you can edit the services you are discovering and update other checks and information.
The MCP integration and why it matters
One of the more interesting aspects of Homelable is its MCP server support. As we all know, AI is the rage these days. This integration allows AI tools to interact with your infrastructure map in a structured way. They can query nodes, understand states, and potentially help with automation or analysis.
You can use prompts like this given from the Github repo:
- What nodes are currently offline?”
- “Add a new LXC container named
piholeat 192.168.1.5, connected to my switch.” - “Trigger a network scan on 192.168.1.0/24 and show me the pending devices.”
- “Show me the full canvas topology.”
Here is an example of the MCP configuration adding Homelable to Claude Desktop:
{
"mcpServers": {
"homelable": {
"type": "sse",
"url": "http://<your-homelab-ip>:8001/mcp",
"headers": {
"X-API-Key": "mcp_sk_yourkey"
}
}
}
}Wrapping up
I really like Homelable. It stands out as where we are headed with these kinds of status and documentation tools. I like to think of it as a mix of Uptime Kuma and Scanopy with diagramming tools built-in. It is really easy to get up and running in just a couple of minutes and you can start scanning your networks in no time. What about you? Have you tried out Homelable as of yet? Let me know in the comments your thoughts on this tool.
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