I’m back, and this time I mean it. The homelab journey has become more than just a hobby; it’s a serious endeavor, and the projects are piling up faster than I can manage them. The urge to document my findings has become too strong to ignore, not just for my own sanity, but to share with others navigating this world. My goal is to share the triumphs and, perhaps more importantly, the tribulations. Today, we’re starting with a tale of my first significant hurdle: the first registry problem with a promising project management tool, Vikunja.

“The Perilous Path to Project Management Perfection: A Vikunja Tale”
Every homelab enthusiast knows the struggle. The list of project ideas grows longer than your free time, and the research spirals into a chaotic mess of browser tabs. That was my reality. I had a backlog of projects—everything from a fancy new media server to a custom-built home automation system—and it was becoming clear that I needed a project management solution just to manage the project of managing my projects. A classic case of “sharpening the saw.”

My goal was clear: find a self-hosted project management tool that was open-source and gave me full control over my data. After some research, I settled on Vikunja, a modern, open-source to-do and project management application. It looked promising with its elegant design and features like Kanban and Gantt charts. The plan was to run it on my Proxmox server, using a virtual machine (VM) to provide a stable, isolated environment for the application. Inside that VM, I would run the various services as containers, allowing for easy deployment and management of each component. This setup gives me the flexibility of a dedicated VM while leveraging the efficiency of containers.

The first step was to get the core services up and running. The Vikunja setup requires a database and a registry to pull the necessary container images. The database came up without a hitch. The registry, however, was a different story.

This is where the real fun began. The problem wasn’t a configuration issue or a network problem; it was a bug in the latest container image itself. The application was throwing 401 Unauthorized errors, indicating that it couldn’t properly authenticate or communicate with its own components. It was a classic “first registry problem” with a twist—the image itself was flawed.

I went through the usual troubleshooting steps, checking my network settings, firewall rules, and configuration files, but nothing worked. The logs were a confusing jumble of connection attempts and 401 errors, leading me to believe I had a configuration problem. After much frustration, I decided to take a step back and question the source of the problem itself.

The breakthrough came when I went searching for answers in the Vikunja community forums. I found a post from another user who had encountered the exact same issue. They had solved it by switching from the latest image tag to a specific, stable version. The solution was not to fix my configuration, but to roll back to a known stable version. I changed the image tag from latest to 0.24.6 in my container configuration, and suddenly, the application sprang to life.

It was a small change, but a significant hurdle. This kind of “first registry problem” is a common pitfall when deploying containerized applications for the first time. The assumption is that the latest version is the most stable, but as I learned, that’s not always the case. Sometimes, a bug can slip through, and the best solution is to roll back to a previous, stable version. In a world of open-source software, the community is often your most valuable resource.

In the end, solving this problem was a rewarding experience. It’s a reminder that even the most seemingly straightforward projects can have their own set of unique challenges. Now, with Vikunja up and running, I can finally start organizing all those other projects. The homelab journey continues, one problem at a time.