MCP for the Homelab

Teach your AI assistant to actually run your lab. Hands-on, copy-paste-friendly, read-only by default — yolo, but with a firewall.

Your assistant can explain every service you run and operate none of them. This book fixes that: the first MCP server tonight on hardware you already own, the shelf of ready-made servers, the scoping ritual, and an error catalog earned by breaking a real lab. The thesis in one line: a shell agent has one tool — everything. An MCP setup has many tools, each exactly as big as it should be.

$8.99

PDF + EPUB · instant download · DRM-free · free lifetime updates to this edition

Buy on Gumroad →

$8.99 flat. There's no other price — no discounts, no expiring codes, ever.

Guarantee: if chapter 4's setup doesn't work on your hardware after chapter 9's fixes, email me. Refund, no form.

The companion repo is free and MIT.

Ten recipe folders — filesystem, Docker, Home Assistant, Proxmox, qBittorrent, Radarr, Pi-hole, TrueNAS, Grafana, custom server. Two run with nothing but Docker. Smoke-tested: 12 passed, 0 failed.

Get the repo →

What's inside

Your first server, tonight
A complete working setup on hardware you already own — chapter 4 is in the free sample.

The shelf
Ready-made servers for the big names, plus the scoping ritual for each.

The Paranoid Chapter
Prompt injection, the docker-socket-is-root rule, writes promoted only after a week of clean reads.

When it breaks
The field guide and error catalog — earned the hard way, so you don't have to.

Ten recipes
Copy-paste Docker Compose stacks; the free repo is their home.

Five weekend projects
Ranked by bragging rights. Every chapter ends with Tonight's Homework.

Who it's not for: anyone expecting an AI revolution. There isn't one — there's a protocol, a shelf, and an error catalog. Honest limitation: the specific servers churn; the book teaches the scoping ritual and the wrapping pattern, which don't. Requires an AI client that speaks MCP and Docker on some machine you own.

Read the setup chapter free

The sample is the intro, chapter 1 (the why), and chapter 4 — the do: a complete MCP setup that works tonight. One email field; the PDF opens immediately. Five short emails after, then silence.

The other book in this series

MCP for Business is the same story for the person in your life who says "governance" without irony — plain English, no code, and a 90-day playbook. Hand them chapter 3 and watch their meeting get shorter.

See the business book →