Homestead

Homestead brings hyperconvergence home: apps, virtual machines, storage, networking and cluster administration in one friendly interface. k3s is preferred for home self-hosting and is the most widely tested platform with Homestead. One command turns a spare Linux machine into a cluster with Homestead on it. RKE2 and Harvester are supported alternatives; you can also install Homestead on an existing Kubernetes cluster.

Try the live demo: the real interface on made-up data, in your browser, with nothing to install. Every page works, and nothing you do there is saved.

Every picture in this wiki comes from the latest release, taken from Homestead's demo data, so they stay current on their own.

Start here

Starting from nothing? One line on a Linux machine asks what to build and does it:

curl -sfL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/homestead-lab/homestead/main/scripts/install.sh | sudo sh

Choose k3s in the installer for a new home setup, or follow the guide for your chosen platform:

You want	Guide
Recommended for home self-hosting: a light cluster on old PCs, mini PCs, VMs or supported ARM64 boards	Installing on k3s
Rancher's RKE2 distribution on your own Linux machines	Installing on RKE2
An integrated HCI operating system with VMs and storage on dedicated hardware	Installing on Harvester
Homestead on a cluster you already run (RKE2, kubeadm, a Headlamp user's cluster)	Installing on an existing cluster

Two machines? Prefer two linked single-node clusters, or add a small third voting k3s server. Two etcd servers cannot tolerate losing either vote. Linked clusters provide shared management, not automatic failover.

On k3s, everything works: containers, the App Store, Compose, networking, IP addresses, Helm, volumes and data protection (the k3s script installs Longhorn), and virtual machines once KubeVirt is added. Only following a Harvester upgrade is Harvester's alone.

Then Installing Homestead covers the choices every install shares - Helm or plain manifests, the address, storage, the node probe - and your first sign-in.

Using Homestead

• Dashboard and nodes - health, every disk, hardware, drive health
• Containers - deploy, edit, groups, updates, privileges, placement, reservations and priority tiers
• App Store - Unraid's Community Applications, deployed properly
• Importing - containers and VMs from an Unraid server, a Docker Compose file, or a VM disk image
• Storage - volumes, Longhorn allocation, adding disks, changing a storage class
• Longhorn V2 support and considerations - hardware, ARM, resource costs and migration
• Data protection - snapshots, backups, backup storage, restores
• Network shares - Samba shares from any volume
• Networking - VIPs, which node answers for each address, services, IP address management
• Virtual machines - create, edit, console, move
• GPU passthrough - host preparation, vBIOS capture, VM setup and physical displays
• Cluster shutdown - confirmed shutdown of every host, live progress, and recovery
• Linked clusters - several clusters from one sign-in, switched or shown together
• Moving between clusters - bring workloads from one cluster to another
• Helm and Resources - charts, and every Kubernetes object
• API - scoped, expiring API keys for Home Assistant, scripts and AI agents
• AI agents - let Claude or another MCP client look after the cluster, with a person approving anything destructive
• Settings - cluster add-ons, hardware, users, MQTT, Homestead updates and health, and how hosts share the work
• Troubleshooting - the problems people actually hit

The reference covers every feature in depth; this wiki is the guided tour.