Trilium finally gave my scattered homelab notes one home I can actually search

Shekhar Vaidya is a veteran technology journalist and computer science engineer. He is the founder of TechLatest, where he has spent years providing technical analysis on hardware and Windows ecosystems. Now a Computing Writer at XDA, Shekhar leverages his deep background in NAS, storage solutions, and PC internals to help readers master their tech.

I started with one service on my homelab, and when it worked, I added another, then another. Within a year, my homelab grew so large that I don’t even remember which port I chose for Jellyfin, which volume I created for it, or which network I kept the container on. In day-to-day use, these things don’t matter much, but when they do, I never remember them in time. So, I finally decided to give the accumulated knowledge a proper home in Trilium.

My homelab outgrew my memory, then my notes

I didn't want another notes app, but the note tree won me over

With a homelab of 20+ containers, across six different machines, a couple of VPSs, and networking gear, it is tough to keep up with each detail. Some of them require scheduled maintenance and others constant attention. It is a mix of Docker services, reverse proxies, tunnels, and network services.

None of this is the same single bare-metal Debian server that I built years ago. Gradually, it has become a proper homelab. And importantly, these different machines depend on each other to work properly. For example, without my NAS up, services like Immich, Jellyfin, and Nextcloud won’t work, since the NAS acts as bulk storage for them.

I always wanted a central hub that stores all my homelab information: my hosts, services, network, configurations, and troubleshooting. But I never fully committed because it always seemed too complex. Sometimes I just ignored it, thinking I could remember everything about my homelab. Usually, I do remember everything, but when it comes to troubleshooting, my mind goes blank.

So far, I have been keeping small notes here and there. For example, a recovery code in the Notes app, API keys in a Word document, compose files in a drive, or network configuration in an LLM chat. I have everything written down, but it's all scattered, and I can never find it when I need it. I did not want another notes app. I already had many note apps: one on my iPhone (which fortunately syncs to my Mac), one on my Galaxy, and another on my Windows PC.

I even considered a wiki and Markdown files in my self-hosted Forgejo, but I always ditched the plan. One day, while scrolling through Reddit threads, I came across Trilium. Then I visited its website. It clicked instantly, and I thought, this was exactly what I was looking for. I loved the note tree concept. Sync, PWA, revision history, password protection, and web clipper were cherries on top.

From scattered notes to a working Trilium notebook

The deploy took minutes, then I had nothing I could import

I had already decided to host Trilium on my home server and build a central hub of information for my homelab. Choosing Trilium was the easy part. Gathering what I already had (not documents per se) and getting them into Trilium was harder.

Going through the GitHub repo and deploying it on Portainer via Docker took a few minutes. But the homepage was empty. And I didn’t have any organized documents that could just be imported into it. I had Notepad files, Notes app snippets, Word documents, and old conversations in ChatGPT and Claude.

I wasn’t sure where to start. I even thought about ditching the idea again. But this time I got a little help. I used Claude to help me organize the old notes and documents. I dropped them in (well, not all of them, just the non-sensitive ones), and I had something to drop into Trilium within a few minutes. I could probably do the same with a local LLM, but that’s a project for another day.

After that, it took very little time to import them into Trilium and organize them in my way. The base was ready, and it was actually looking better with my own data than the screenshots on its website. The import wasn’t perfect, but it gave me a head start.

Living with my own documentation

Nothing felt different at first, then I spotted the flaw in my setup

Honestly, in my day-to-day work, I didn’t feel a real difference, but maybe that’s because nothing came up that made me dig into the notes. But I noticed a change I didn’t see at first. I felt more confident having the information in hand.

For instance, I recently deployed a service on my homelab. Previously, I’d checked Portainer and run docker ps to check which port was free. But this time, I opened Trilium and took a quick look at the inventory subtree, and I was good. These are small changes that go unnoticed, but they add up and help a lot.

I don’t want to make it a feature list, but in a couple of days of use, I genuinely benefited from the search functionality. It works almost perfectly. Even though my notebook isn’t large enough to say much about scale, I looked at the codebase; it uses exact match first, then fuzzy logic, so on a notebook with thousands of pages, it will depend on the server to handle that search.

I even tried the built-in AI/LLM feature. It allowed me to add my LLM, local or cloud, and use it. I tried running Gemma 4 (via llama.cpp) through an OpenAI-compatible endpoint, but the results weren’t what I expected. I asked it a simple question regarding an incident that I’d already dealt with, and the notebook had an entry about it; the model couldn’t find it.

My setup had a major flaw. I was documenting the server on the same server. So Trilium was keeping information about the services running alongside it. If the home server went down, I’d need that data to rebuild it, and I wouldn’t be able to get to it.

Trilium offers sync and backup options, but for them to work, I will have to either host it elsewhere or keep the backup on separate storage. Fortunately, I have multiple VPSes and a NAS, so the workaround is easy for me.

Good enough for my homelab

Trilium gave my homelab’s accumulated information a proper home. It came with some added responsibilities and tradeoffs, but those were easy to handle and work around. I still have many features to explore, but the ones I've used are good enough for me. It worked for me, but that doesn’t mean it will work for your homelab. If you have scattered files here and there, Trilium can give your homelab notes a structure to start with.