Building The Coe Lab
The story behind building a personal technology laboratory.
How I built a comprehensive homelab infrastructure with AI integration, automated monitoring, and self-hosted services.
The Coe Lab started as a simple idea: what if I could build a personal technology laboratory that combines infrastructure, AI, and automation into a cohesive system? Six months later, here's what I've built.
Everything runs in Docker containers on a Linux server with flexible storage virtualization, application hosting, and container management. Key benefits:
What makes The Coe Lab different is the AI layer that ties everything together. OpenClaw acts as the central nervous system:
Every hour, OpenClaw checks:
Results are posted to Discord's #TCL channel. If something's wrong, I know immediately.
Every 30 minutes, the media manager:
On the first run, it cleaned up 10 dead torrents and triggered searches for 12 movies and 5 TV shows.
My Windows gaming PC (LenovoGaming) runs OpenClaw Node for browser automation. If it goes offline:
This has saved me multiple trips to the basement to manually reboot the machine.
The AI assistant needs context to be useful. Neo4j stores:
This allows conversational queries like "What's the status of the website project?" or "When is Jeni's birthday?" with accurate, contextual answers.
The Coe Lab website (thecoelab.com) serves multiple purposes:
Built with Next.js 14, TypeScript, and Tailwind CSS, deployed as a static export to Nginx.
If I do something twice manually, it gets automated. This applies to media management, health checks, backups, and even reboots.
Systems should recover from failures automatically. The node reboot workflow is a perfect example—no human intervention needed.
Everything is monitored and logged. If something breaks, I want to know why. Grafana dashboards show trends over time, not just current status.
Every service, script, and configuration is documented in markdown. Future-me (or anyone else) should be able to understand how things work.
Authelia protects all external-facing services. Tailscale provides encrypted remote access. Internal services don't expose ports unnecessarily.
The roadmap includes:
Building this lab has taught me:
If you're building your own lab or have questions about any of these systems, I'm happy to share what I've learned. Reach out via the contact page or connect on Discord.