Containerization simplifies IT operations and nearly all standard software can be deployed in a container environment. Until today, I have operated GitLab as an omnibus installation. While Omnibus already greatly simplifies the deployment experience, there still needs to be done and configured a lot to run GitLab. Before GitLab supported Let’s Encrypt that even meant taking care of certificate renewal and making sure certificate configurations don’t break during upgrades.

As I intend to run more software on the server running GitLab, I wanted to setup a reverse proxy that distributes traffic accordingly. With Traefik being a fresh and small cloud native edge router I decided to migrate the Omnibus GitLab installation to a Docker deployment behind the Traefik proxy.

I have recently decided to start building a smart home. A colleague of mine who has lots of experience and even writes a blog about smart home has recommended me to take a look at openHAB. openHAB is an open-source IoT platform that is capable of integrating various standards and devices and therefore seemed like a perfect fit.

I first thought about installing openHAB on a Raspberry PI, but then decided to run it on my QNAP NAS, as the NAS is running anyways. As openHAB provides a Docker image and I already used the QNAP Container Station to run Crashplan online backup with Docker I immediately got excited and had to install openHAB with Docker on my QNAP NAS running QTS 4.3.