7 ms·

Dashy: Homepage for Your Homelab

153 points by memorable 5y ago

ndom91 4y ago
Theres are a lot of these home lab dashboards out there, but this is one of the nicer and more well maintained ones I've seen. Kudos!
shaky-carrousel 4y ago
With Heimdall I can show additional info for each application, via its API.
CommanderData 4y ago
I tried this a few months ago. It's great with many features. I wanted something that loads instantly for my homepage, Dashy took 2-3 seconds while Heimdall was instant.
- wutanc 4y ago
  I just created my own little dashboard app (don't want to steal focus so wont link it). But what would you consider instant? This was a focus of mine when creating it and I actually found Heimdall some what slow. On my network heimdall takes ~300ms to load while my own loads in ~60ms. Not a huge difference I know but it's some what noticeable.
peteforde 4y ago
Q: What is a Homelab? It's really unfortunate that the Dashy homepage doesn't start by answering this question, and explaining why you need one. As nice as the page is, it falls victim to the same conceit that has plagued many OSS project pages since forever, by implicitly suggesting that "if you're here, you already know what you're looking at".
- marginalia_nu 4y ago
  It's when you have a bunch of (typically but not always enterprise-grade) computer and network equipment to play around with at home. Check out <https://www.reddit.com/r/homelab https://www.reddit.com/r/homelab> if you want a feel for the hobby.
  - peteforde 4y ago
    Thanks for the explainer! TIL I am sort of weirded out that having a computer and random tools that you do geeky things with needs a term, but hey, humans sure do love naming things.
    - soneil 4y ago
      Naming it does make it much easier to find community, resources, etc. A lack of nouns makes me poor google-fu. There does seem to be a blurry and moving line between "homelab" and "selfhosting" though, which doesn't help clarify things.
      - xoa 4y ago
        Yeah, they're not strict terms. I personally think a significant differentiator though is that "homelab" tends to have a bit more emphasis on, well, the lab part. Ie., there is a certain amount of experimentation going on with some regularity. Beta software and firmware or even hardware, bleeding edge stuff, a higher tolerance for breaking things (and maybe leaving them broken for a bit when something else catches one's eye), etc. Some of the stuff attempted might not have any direct work requirement or value. It might be purely for fun and personal learning, and/or it might have some professional relation in terms of testing out new stuff in a initial way and kicking the tires before any kind of initial serious deployment. I mean, again there are certainly no hard and fast rules, but "homelab" settings often place more emphasis on dynamism than pure reliability, such as virtualizing things one normally wouldn't all on a single box. Virtual routing/firewall/edge and NAS are big examples to me that normally have their own dedicated hardware (be it on the metal or virtualized as part of one type of HA strat, but still dedicated). Whereas selfhosting is hosting, though by oneself. The big difference is the level of dependence, how much one requires the stuff being up to the extent if it isn't that's an immediate blocker on other work. In the same way one would typically expect a commercial host to be more focused on uptime, redundancy and overall lack of surprises, selfhosting tends to be more conservative, throw more hardware at a problem, invest more time and effort in polish and smoothing interaction with the wider world, etc. Basically the stuff you'd expect for something where "if this goes down on Friday my weekend is shot" vs "if this goes down on Friday eh maybe I'll poke at it Sunday night or next week sometime". Of course, one can also have both of these in the same home/SOHO/barn or whatever, just as businesses with decent IT will have some sort of minimal "lab" at least to do a bit of testing with before even getting to early staging. I myself am primarily on the selfhosting side of the spectrum at this point, but I do have a semi-isolated lab section as well where breaking world won't impact my work (nor result in upset family members!). No one right way to do it. Edit: also on topic, no I don't have a dashboard :). I've at times considered products like Prometheus/Grafana/Heimdall and I guess now there's another one I could look at here, but I've never really been able to justify it vs other stuff. They're often fairly heavy or seem to have side effects to worry about (including security, I like to keep dashboards and IPMI highly isolated on VLANs or their own independent physical network entirely), and while it could be pretty and satisfying my stuff tends to either be working or it's glaringly obvious something is broken since I depend on it, or if it's an emergency condition it's blaring notifications at my phone anyway. And same as commercial service dashboards, to me it seems like to really be an addition a dashboard would need a fairly independent chain from what it's monitoring. Otherwise if the core goes down the dashboard also drops too. That means more dedicated hardware, even if only something like an RPi. I could see a dashboard potentially being handy for unified monitoring of stats and softer errors, stuff that isn't an emergency itself but might be indicative of upcoming issues or issues with world (ISP always having problems at a certain time or failing to meet SLA say). But hasn't been truly compelling yet. Though sometimes the screenshots people put up make me quite tempted! Edit 2: upon a bit more reflection, non-technical stakeholders are a factor as well. Just because something is selfhosted doesn't mean it's for oneself only, on the contrary selfhosters having stuff for friends/family, or a group of neighbors in an apartment/dorm having some shared resources is a common use case. A decent dashboard could serve the purpose of giving others a feel for what's going on. Both in terms of understanding/reporting issues without having to go to the admin(s)(you), but also just plain seeing more of what they heck you're up to. A lot of infra stuff in particular can take a certain investment of time and money but not look like much on the outside. Selling others can be valuable in and of itself, humans overall are visual creatures.
- codetrotter 4y ago
  A homelab is an umbrella term covering everything from the network cabling to the physical servers, to the services self-hosted, by someone for learning, for fun, or for other purposes, in their home or in their garage etc. See also https://www.reddit.com/r/homelab/ https://www.reddit.com/r/homelab/
  - anthropodie 4y ago
    Also see https://www.reddit.com/r/selfhosted https://www.reddit.com/r/selfhosted
- lloydatkinson 4y ago
  This does not make sense I don’t expect every single site I visit to explain the fundamentals of everything.
  - pas 4y ago
    Not everything, just the thing that is fundamental to the ecosystem the site belongs to.
    - tomc1985 4y ago
      Still a bit unreasonable if you ask me. Nothing wrong with putting the responsibility for googling on the user.
      - peteforde 4y ago
        Your assertion that there's nothing wrong with not explaining why a thing exists is not backed by reality. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qp0HIF3SfI4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qp0HIF3SfI4 Of course, it's their choice. But don't conflate that with being the best thing for the project or the visitor. Presumably the site exists to convince people to use it, no?
    - hnlmorg 4y ago
      It's a really common term. Odds are if you don't know what a homelab is then you're quite far removed from anyone who would benefit from this. While I'm completely in favour of having documentation that is explicit, there is a fine line between that and flooding your landing page with super basic content that doesn't help your target audience just so that those who don't need this can understand why they don't need it. If you can't understand why that is a problem then think for a moment who the audience is and why it's important that your content be tailored for them.
      - peteforde 4y ago
        I'm a third-generation maker and inventor. My job requires that I have an intimate understanding of engineering, prototyping, hardware, software and networking. I literally have two kinds of soldering gun on my desk, alongside an oscilloscope and a signal generator. I can talk you through how traffic is routed around the internet and what happens when you press a key on your keyboard in nauseating detail. Clearly, it's not as common a term as you believe that it is.
Havoc 4y ago
Looks very neat & I like the groupings. I've moved away from dashboards in favour of building my own out of HTML and sticking it in a CI/CD that redeploys it on changes. For what is essentially just a handful of links they're quite heavy & problem prone. e.g. I spent literally hours troubleshooting a login issue on a self-hosted service. Root cause? Dashboard (heimdall) hammering the service with logins so hard that the service thought it's under attack. All to animate the shiny button on a dash...
vladvasiliu 4y ago
I've seen the other day people talking about Heimdall in a thread about self-hosted things. I do run a (distributed!) homelab, but it's not clear to me what problem these dashboards solve. I can split the things I run on my homelab in two categories: either "infrastructure", things like VPNs, routing, DB, etc, or "actual apps", like a wiki and whatnot. For the first category, I basically don't "do" anything to them once they're set up. For the second, I type directly the URL as I do with any other website. For my monitoring needs I have a bunch of Grafana dashboards connected to Prometheus. I check them from time to time because I like looking at the pretty colored graphs for some reason, but that's about it.
- wutanc 4y ago
  A lot of people don't have nice urls for their homelab services, having to memorize IP-numbers and ports is a lot harder. Personally I get a nice feeling of accomplishment from looking at a dashboard with all the services I've set up. It's maybe not super useful but it's nice.
  - vladvasiliu 4y ago
    Fair point. It's true that in my case, one of the first things I did was set up DNS. My lab also has a public domain name that I manage through Cloudflare, which also gives me easy SSL [0] for my services. --- [0] "easy" as in I don't have to have an open port for Let's Encrypt. And I'm also uncomfortable with giving full DNS access to every service, because I haven't yet found a registrar with sane access control for zone management.
    - arjvik 4y ago
      I've never tried this before, but take a look at https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/02/technical-deep-dive-securing-automation-acme-dns-challenge-validation https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/02/technical-deep-dive-se..., specifically the CNAME and ACME-DNS methods.
      - 4y ago
BonoboIO 4y ago
I just use [service].domain_i_own.com Cloudflare Tunnels or just proxying is so ease. Radarr, Jackett, Sonarr
paulkrush 4y ago
I get excited every time I see the word Homelab. I am hopping to see people running research analytical lab experiments. Like dashboards of all their esp8266 IOT sensors. Live 48x64 pixel streams of spectroscopy machines. Flow rates on the micro-dosers. Looping time lapses of the past 24 hours of reactions. Tabs with KVM screens of old lab live equipment that where saved from the scrapers like electron microscopes running on 386's. Links to their fellow live HomeLabers. Gosh, I think am I just going to start my own genre of LabPunk fiction.
octagons 4y ago
The woman who develops Dashy is incredibly talented, and is extremely responsive to issues and pull requests for this project. Take a look at the pipelines she has added to the GitHub repository- it’s almost ridiculous the amount of automation that can be accomplished with them.

153 points by memorable 5y ago

Theres are a lot of these home lab dashboards out there, but this is one of the nicer and more well maintained ones I've seen. Kudos!

shaky-carrousel 4y ago

With Heimdall I can show additional info for each application, via its API.

CommanderData 4y ago

I tried this a few months ago. It's great with many features. I wanted something that loads instantly for my homepage, Dashy took 2-3 seconds while Heimdall was instant.

wutanc 4y ago
I just created my own little dashboard app (don't want to steal focus so wont link it). But what would you consider instant? This was a focus of mine when creating it and I actually found Heimdall some what slow. On my network heimdall takes ~300ms to load while my own loads in ~60ms. Not a huge difference I know but it's some what noticeable.

peteforde 4y ago

Q: What is a Homelab? It's really unfortunate that the Dashy homepage doesn't start by answering this question, and explaining why you need one. As nice as the page is, it falls victim to the same conceit that has plagued many OSS project pages since forever, by implicitly suggesting that "if you're here, you already know what you're looking at".

marginalia_nu 4y ago
It's when you have a bunch of (typically but not always enterprise-grade) computer and network equipment to play around with at home. Check out <https://www.reddit.com/r/homelab https://www.reddit.com/r/homelab> if you want a feel for the hobby.
- peteforde 4y ago
  Thanks for the explainer! TIL I am sort of weirded out that having a computer and random tools that you do geeky things with needs a term, but hey, humans sure do love naming things.
  - soneil 4y ago
    Naming it does make it much easier to find community, resources, etc. A lack of nouns makes me poor google-fu. There does seem to be a blurry and moving line between "homelab" and "selfhosting" though, which doesn't help clarify things.
    - xoa 4y ago
      Yeah, they're not strict terms. I personally think a significant differentiator though is that "homelab" tends to have a bit more emphasis on, well, the lab part. Ie., there is a certain amount of experimentation going on with some regularity. Beta software and firmware or even hardware, bleeding edge stuff, a higher tolerance for breaking things (and maybe leaving them broken for a bit when something else catches one's eye), etc. Some of the stuff attempted might not have any direct work requirement or value. It might be purely for fun and personal learning, and/or it might have some professional relation in terms of testing out new stuff in a initial way and kicking the tires before any kind of initial serious deployment. I mean, again there are certainly no hard and fast rules, but "homelab" settings often place more emphasis on dynamism than pure reliability, such as virtualizing things one normally wouldn't all on a single box. Virtual routing/firewall/edge and NAS are big examples to me that normally have their own dedicated hardware (be it on the metal or virtualized as part of one type of HA strat, but still dedicated). Whereas selfhosting is hosting, though by oneself. The big difference is the level of dependence, how much one requires the stuff being up to the extent if it isn't that's an immediate blocker on other work. In the same way one would typically expect a commercial host to be more focused on uptime, redundancy and overall lack of surprises, selfhosting tends to be more conservative, throw more hardware at a problem, invest more time and effort in polish and smoothing interaction with the wider world, etc. Basically the stuff you'd expect for something where "if this goes down on Friday my weekend is shot" vs "if this goes down on Friday eh maybe I'll poke at it Sunday night or next week sometime". Of course, one can also have both of these in the same home/SOHO/barn or whatever, just as businesses with decent IT will have some sort of minimal "lab" at least to do a bit of testing with before even getting to early staging. I myself am primarily on the selfhosting side of the spectrum at this point, but I do have a semi-isolated lab section as well where breaking world won't impact my work (nor result in upset family members!). No one right way to do it. Edit: also on topic, no I don't have a dashboard :). I've at times considered products like Prometheus/Grafana/Heimdall and I guess now there's another one I could look at here, but I've never really been able to justify it vs other stuff. They're often fairly heavy or seem to have side effects to worry about (including security, I like to keep dashboards and IPMI highly isolated on VLANs or their own independent physical network entirely), and while it could be pretty and satisfying my stuff tends to either be working or it's glaringly obvious something is broken since I depend on it, or if it's an emergency condition it's blaring notifications at my phone anyway. And same as commercial service dashboards, to me it seems like to really be an addition a dashboard would need a fairly independent chain from what it's monitoring. Otherwise if the core goes down the dashboard also drops too. That means more dedicated hardware, even if only something like an RPi. I could see a dashboard potentially being handy for unified monitoring of stats and softer errors, stuff that isn't an emergency itself but might be indicative of upcoming issues or issues with world (ISP always having problems at a certain time or failing to meet SLA say). But hasn't been truly compelling yet. Though sometimes the screenshots people put up make me quite tempted! Edit 2: upon a bit more reflection, non-technical stakeholders are a factor as well. Just because something is selfhosted doesn't mean it's for oneself only, on the contrary selfhosters having stuff for friends/family, or a group of neighbors in an apartment/dorm having some shared resources is a common use case. A decent dashboard could serve the purpose of giving others a feel for what's going on. Both in terms of understanding/reporting issues without having to go to the admin(s)(you), but also just plain seeing more of what they heck you're up to. A lot of infra stuff in particular can take a certain investment of time and money but not look like much on the outside. Selling others can be valuable in and of itself, humans overall are visual creatures.
codetrotter 4y ago
A homelab is an umbrella term covering everything from the network cabling to the physical servers, to the services self-hosted, by someone for learning, for fun, or for other purposes, in their home or in their garage etc. See also https://www.reddit.com/r/homelab/ https://www.reddit.com/r/homelab/
- anthropodie 4y ago
  Also see https://www.reddit.com/r/selfhosted https://www.reddit.com/r/selfhosted
lloydatkinson 4y ago
This does not make sense I don’t expect every single site I visit to explain the fundamentals of everything.
- pas 4y ago
  Not everything, just the thing that is fundamental to the ecosystem the site belongs to.
  - tomc1985 4y ago
    Still a bit unreasonable if you ask me. Nothing wrong with putting the responsibility for googling on the user.
    - peteforde 4y ago
      Your assertion that there's nothing wrong with not explaining why a thing exists is not backed by reality. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qp0HIF3SfI4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qp0HIF3SfI4 Of course, it's their choice. But don't conflate that with being the best thing for the project or the visitor. Presumably the site exists to convince people to use it, no?
  - hnlmorg 4y ago
    It's a really common term. Odds are if you don't know what a homelab is then you're quite far removed from anyone who would benefit from this. While I'm completely in favour of having documentation that is explicit, there is a fine line between that and flooding your landing page with super basic content that doesn't help your target audience just so that those who don't need this can understand why they don't need it. If you can't understand why that is a problem then think for a moment who the audience is and why it's important that your content be tailored for them.
    - peteforde 4y ago
      I'm a third-generation maker and inventor. My job requires that I have an intimate understanding of engineering, prototyping, hardware, software and networking. I literally have two kinds of soldering gun on my desk, alongside an oscilloscope and a signal generator. I can talk you through how traffic is routed around the internet and what happens when you press a key on your keyboard in nauseating detail. Clearly, it's not as common a term as you believe that it is.

Havoc 4y ago

Looks very neat & I like the groupings. I've moved away from dashboards in favour of building my own out of HTML and sticking it in a CI/CD that redeploys it on changes. For what is essentially just a handful of links they're quite heavy & problem prone. e.g. I spent literally hours troubleshooting a login issue on a self-hosted service. Root cause? Dashboard (heimdall) hammering the service with logins so hard that the service thought it's under attack. All to animate the shiny button on a dash...

vladvasiliu 4y ago

I've seen the other day people talking about Heimdall in a thread about self-hosted things. I do run a (distributed!) homelab, but it's not clear to me what problem these dashboards solve. I can split the things I run on my homelab in two categories: either "infrastructure", things like VPNs, routing, DB, etc, or "actual apps", like a wiki and whatnot. For the first category, I basically don't "do" anything to them once they're set up. For the second, I type directly the URL as I do with any other website. For my monitoring needs I have a bunch of Grafana dashboards connected to Prometheus. I check them from time to time because I like looking at the pretty colored graphs for some reason, but that's about it.

wutanc 4y ago
A lot of people don't have nice urls for their homelab services, having to memorize IP-numbers and ports is a lot harder. Personally I get a nice feeling of accomplishment from looking at a dashboard with all the services I've set up. It's maybe not super useful but it's nice.
- vladvasiliu 4y ago
  Fair point. It's true that in my case, one of the first things I did was set up DNS. My lab also has a public domain name that I manage through Cloudflare, which also gives me easy SSL [0] for my services. --- [0] "easy" as in I don't have to have an open port for Let's Encrypt. And I'm also uncomfortable with giving full DNS access to every service, because I haven't yet found a registrar with sane access control for zone management.
  - arjvik 4y ago
    I've never tried this before, but take a look at https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/02/technical-deep-dive-securing-automation-acme-dns-challenge-validation https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/02/technical-deep-dive-se..., specifically the CNAME and ACME-DNS methods.
    - 4y ago

BonoboIO 4y ago

I just use [service].domain_i_own.com Cloudflare Tunnels or just proxying is so ease. Radarr, Jackett, Sonarr

paulkrush 4y ago

I get excited every time I see the word Homelab. I am hopping to see people running research analytical lab experiments. Like dashboards of all their esp8266 IOT sensors. Live 48x64 pixel streams of spectroscopy machines. Flow rates on the micro-dosers. Looping time lapses of the past 24 hours of reactions. Tabs with KVM screens of old lab live equipment that where saved from the scrapers like electron microscopes running on 386's. Links to their fellow live HomeLabers. Gosh, I think am I just going to start my own genre of LabPunk fiction.

octagons 4y ago

The woman who develops Dashy is incredibly talented, and is extremely responsive to issues and pull requests for this project. Take a look at the pipelines she has added to the GitHub repository- it’s almost ridiculous the amount of automation that can be accomplished with them.