updated docs and readme to showcase playbooks

docs/AnsiblePlaybooks.md

@@ -0,0 +1,81 @@
+# Ansible Playbooks
+
+How updates get applied across the homelab: one shared role, one thin playbook per stack, triggered through Semaphore.
+
+## Why
+
+Updating each Docker Compose stack by hand — SSH in, `cd` into the folder, `docker compose pull`, `docker compose up -d`, check nothing broke, prune old images — works fine for one or two services. Across a dozen-plus stacks it gets repetitive and easy to skip steps (especially the health check after recreating containers). Ansible plus Semaphore turns that into a one-click job per stack, with consistent behavior and a visible run history.
+
+## Structure
+
+```
+ansible/
+└── playbooks/
+    ├── roles/
+    │   └── docker_compose_update/
+    │       └── tasks/
+    │           └── main.yml       # the shared update logic
+    ├── update-filebrowser.yml
+    ├── update-n8n.yml
+    ├── update-npm.yml
+    ├── update-pihole.yml
+    ├── update-plex.yml
+    ├── update-portainer.yml
+    ├── update-prowlarr.yml
+    ├── update-radarr.yml
+    ├── update-samba.yml
+    ├── update-sentinel.yml
+    ├── update-smartctl.yml
+    ├── update-sonarr.yml
+    ├── update-whisparr.yml
+    ├── update-agent-canvas.yml
+    ├── update-grafana.yml
+    └── ping.yml
+```
+
+One role, reused by every playbook. Each playbook is intentionally tiny:
+
+```yaml
+---
+- hosts: all
+  become: true
+  vars:
+    compose_dir: "/home/rezayaghobi/docker/<service>"
+    service_name: "<Friendly Name>"
+  roles:
+    - docker_compose_update
+```
+
+Adding a new stack means adding a new playbook like the one above — no changes to the role itself.
+
+## What the role actually does
+
+`docker_compose_update` runs the same sequence for every stack:
+
+1. **Records a start time**, for a duration summary at the end
+2. **Snapshots `docker system df`** before the pull, so disk usage is visible
+3. **Runs `docker compose pull`** in the stack's directory
+4. **Snapshots `docker system df`** again after the pull — comparing the two makes it obvious when an update pulled down something unexpectedly large (this is what caught a ~9GB pull for the OpenHands/Ollama stack early on — see [AI Coding Agent](AI-Agent.md))
+5. **Runs `docker compose up -d`** to recreate any containers with new images
+6. **Waits 5 seconds**, then checks `docker compose ps`
+7. **Asserts every container is actually up** — fails the run (and skips cleanup) if anything shows `Exit`, `Created`, or `Restarting` instead of running
+8. **Runs `docker image prune -f`** to reclaim space from now-unused image layers, but only if the health check passed
+9. **Prints a summary** — duration, cleanup result, pass/fail
+
+If any step fails (a bad pull, a container that won't start), Ansible stops the play immediately rather than continuing on to prune images out from under a broken deployment.
+
+## Running it via Semaphore
+
+Semaphore ([see Semaphore Guide](Semaphore.md)) is what actually executes these — no manual `ansible-playbook` on the server. Each playbook is set up as a Task Template pointed at this repo, so updating a stack is a matter of picking its template and hitting run.
+
+The Semaphore dashboard gives a quick visual of run history — successes in green, failures in red:
+
+![Semaphore dashboard showing task run history, mostly successful with one failed run](images/semaphore-dashboard-stats.png)
+
+## Lessons learned
+
+- Keeping the update logic in a single role instead of copy-pasting it into every playbook means a fix or improvement (like the disk-usage snapshots) only has to happen once — see the role's own history for an example of that in practice.
+- The `docker system df` before/after comparison earns its place: it's what made an unexpectedly large image pull for OpenHands/Ollama visible immediately, instead of just being a mystery bandwidth spike after the fact.
+- The health-check assert before pruning matters — pruning images out from under a stack that failed to come back up would make debugging (and rolling back) harder, not easier.
+
+[← Back to Home](Home.md)

docs/Home.md

@@ -15,6 +15,7 @@ Documentation for a self-hosted homelab running entirely on Docker Compose. This
 - [Reverse Proxy](Reverse-Proxy.md)
 - [Semaphore](Semaphore.md)
 - [DockScope](DockScope.md)
+- [Ansible Playbooks](AnsiblePlaybooks.md)
 
 ## At a glance
 
@@ -25,7 +26,7 @@ Documentation for a self-hosted homelab running entirely on Docker Compose. This
 | **Management** | Portainer, **DockScope** (3D visual dashboard) |
 | **Monitoring** | Prometheus + Grafana + cAdvisor + node-exporter |
 | **Network** | Pi-hole (DNS filtering), Samba (file sharing), nginx (proxy managing) |
-| **Automation**     | n8n + **Semaphore** (Ansible Web UI) || **Media** | Plex + Sonarr/Radarr/Prowlarr + qBittorrent |
+| **Automation**     | n8n + **Semaphore** (Ansible Web UI) + **Ansible** (update playbooks) || **Media** | Plex + Sonarr/Radarr/Prowlarr + qBittorrent |
 | **Disk health** | Hard Disk Sentinel |
 | **AI Agent** | OpenHands + Ollama |