Introduction

hll (pronounced “hell”—short for HomeLab Language) is a small declarative language for describing homelab services. You write a compact .hll file describing a service—its image, the port it exposes, its volumes, environment variables, restart policy—and hllc, the hll compiler, transpiles it into a Docker Compose YAML file.

It exists to remove copy-paste. Standing up a new homelab service with Docker Compose and a reverse proxy usually means duplicating a near-identical Compose service block and label set, changing only the image, the port, and the subdomain. hll lets you write just what’s different about a service, and pull in the repeated parts (the proxy’s network, its routing labels, the forward-auth middleware, the PUID/PGID pair every LinuxServer.io image wants) from a shared template.

hll is a transpiler, not an interpreter—there’s no evaluation, no runtime, no state. Every .hll file compiles down to plain Compose YAML that you check in, deploy, and read like any other Compose file.

Who this book is for

This is a user guide: it’s for someone writing .hll files to describe their own homelab, not someone modifying the compiler itself. It covers the language’s syntax in plain terms, every built-in field, how templates and imports work, and the hllc command line.

If you’re looking for the formal grammar, desugaring rules, or the internals of the lexer/parser/codegen pipeline, see docs/DESIGN.md in the repository instead—the compiler builds against that implementer-facing spec. This book is a friendlier presentation layer on top of it, covering the same rules with prose and examples instead of Backus-Naur Form (BNF).

A quick taste

service jellyfin {
  image "jellyfin/jellyfin:latest"
  expose 8096
  volume "/mnt/media" -> "/data"
  env PUID = "1000"
  restart unless-stopped
}

hllc build turns that into a ready-to-run docker-compose.yml with a jellyfin service, its image, a bind mount, an environment variable, a restart policy, and the network wiring—all from those six lines.

A reverse proxy handles the hostname that reaches it, rather than Compose, so that isn’t part of the language: it’s labels, and templates write them. Routing covers the set hllc ships for Traefik. The rest of this book walks through how all of that works, starting with Getting Started.