Automate Everything: The Scripts That Take Your Home Lab to the Next Level
How I use simple scripts to clean up, back up, and self-heal my home lab without constant manual work
If you’ve been running a home lab for a while, you already know that managing everything manually sucks and can eat up tons of time. The real upgrade to a next-level home lab isn’t more hardware. It’s automation. When your systems can handle cleanup, monitoring, backups, and updates on their own, you will breathe a sigh of relief. Also, you will then get to focus on building, testing, and experimenting instead of fixing.
Automation scripts are the key to that freedom. And the good news is they don’t have to be complicated. A few lines of Bash or PowerShell can make a world of difference. And now with AI tools that can help write scripts, there’s really no barrier to getting started. Even if you’ve never written a script before, you can start by simply saving your most-used commands into a .sh file and schedule them to run automatically.
Here are a few highlights from the full list of scripts I shared in my latest guide:
Start with a Docker cleanup script to keep your hosts clean. Containers are great, but they leave behind old images, networks, and volumes that equal a lot of wasted disk space. A quick weekly cleanup script can reclaim gigabytes of storage with almost no effort.
Next, use a Proxmox backup automation script. Instead of manually creating snapshots, let a simple loop handle all your VMs automatically. You can use this if you are using Proxmox Backup Server or a shared NFS backup. It’s really a set-it-and-forget-it task that pays off when you need to restore data in a disaster.
If you’re running Ceph or MicroCeph, a cluster health check script is an awesome tool that can be part of your monitoring. It can check the health of your distributed storage and send alerts to Slack or Discord when something goes wrong. The best part is that it’s short, lightweight, and easy to integrate with any existing monitoring system.
Don’t overlook SSL certificates either. Even with Let’s Encrypt, renewals can fail. A certificate expiration monitor script can check your domains daily and warn you before a cert breaks your site.
Then there’s the home lab inventory script. You can easily use nmap to map your entire network, report hostnames, IPs, and open ports. You can even feed data into tools like NetBox or phpIPAM automatically.
Rounding out the essentials are scripts like container auto-updates, VM snapshot cleanup, Ansible patching, UPS-triggered graceful shutdown, and even a self-healing monitor that restarts crashed containers or services before you even notice something went down.
These automations do a number of things. They save time, but they also teach you about systems management. They can help you learn new tools like Git, and make your home lab operate more like an enterprise environment.
Check out my full post with all 10 scripts. There I give you the code for the scripts so you can copy and tweak for your own setup. Check out the full guide here: Top 10 Automation Scripts Every Home Lab Should Have in 2025