How I Use Terraform Modules to Automate My Entire Home Lab Setup

Learn about the best terraform modules you can use for provisioning everything from Proxmox VMs to deploying Docker containers and monitoring tools across your home lab.

If you’ve spent any time automating your home lab infrastructure, you know that Terraform is one of the best tools to get things done. It lets you manage many different environments from Proxmox, vSphere, Docker, and Netdata. That’s where Terraform modules and providers can really shine. The right providers allow you to automate across most of the important infrastructure types in the home lab.

For 2025, there are many different providers you can use. These range from the official providers to community written plugins. If you are spinning up virtual machines in Proxmox or deploying monitoring stacks for your containers, when you use the right modules it can make your automation go faster and more efficiently.

If you’re running Proxmox, the telmate/proxmox module is one that is battle-tested for provisioning and managing virtual machines and containers. It allows you to define resources declaratively in code and allows you to use and build cloud-init, LXC, and complex networking setups. For those who want lightweight LXC deployments, the bpg/proxmox-lxc module builds on top of the telmate provider to provide a streamlined way to spin up Linux containers with easier syntax.

Home labbers using vSphere will appreciate the official vsphere provider. It has matured to handle everything from clusters and datastores to advanced virtual hardware settings. The syntax has become cleaner, and the module ecosystem has really taken off. You can carry out all the common use cases like VM cloning and tagging for lab organization.

If your lab also runs Docker, Terraform can be used for your container lifecycle with the official docker/docker provider. This makes it possible to define containers, networks, and volumes alongside your infrastructure. This is something that’s perfect when you want one Terraform plan to spin up both your VMs and the services running inside them on top of Docker containers.

For monitoring, the anschoewe/netdata module is a great plugin for deploying Netdata nodes and registering them automatically with your Netdata Cloud instance. It helps you to keep all your monitoring and observability setup as code. This way you can recreate it instantly across new systems or rebuilds.

And for configuration management, the gchamon/ansible provider allows you to use Ansible with Terraform in a seamless way. You can provision VMs with Terraform and hand them off to Ansible for configuration. It’s a clean way to handle hybrid automation and use the tools that are purpose built for what they are intended to do.

For the full list of modules and code snippets check out the complete post here: Best Terraform Modules for Home Labs in 2025