18 ms·

Dashy – A self-hosted homepage for your homelab

354 points by mmmmkay 4y ago

ur-whale 4y ago
I find it amazing that these days, when announcing a tool like this, you have to specifically explain that it is self-hosted. I'd expect a "caveat emptor: requires the cloud", but certainly not a "warning: self hosted". What strange times we live in.
tasn 4y ago
Ha, great to see my own project[1] featured there in one of the screenshots. :) 1: www.etesync.com
BrandoElFollito 4y ago
What I love in these posts is that everyone is providing their solution, the solutions have demos, and the demos list super interesting services I did not know and now absolutely need :) Thanks a lot!
joshstrange 4y ago
As someone who has configured a number of products like this I have to say I find it all to be "nerd candy". As in it's a lot of fun to setup but not very fulfilling and I can never change my habits to actually use the dashboard (even ones that can show relevant info about the apps they link to, like up/down speed or other stats). I'd be interested in hearing from people who have set this (or an alternative) up and use it daily/regularly. For me I just always go to myservice.mydomain.com directly. I normally only have to type 2-3 letters before it pops up for me and it's way faster than going to first to a dashboard/launch page, finding my service, and clicking on it.
- 6ak74rfy 4y ago
  One, my URLs look like http://home.box:8442 http://home.box:8442, so they aren’t easy to remember when you have a few devices. Two, I need to communicate the same to my wife and so, if the solution were bookmarking, we’d both have to do those. Tools like Dashy or Flame (the one I use) are great for that.
  - acoard 4y ago
    My solution was this was a bookmark folder on Chrome.
    - 6ak74rfy 4y ago
      That’s the thing - I use Firefox, wife uses Safari. One home page internal to our home is perfect.
  - suyula 4y ago
    In a similar situation I decided on a reverse proxy using nginx-- I'd just navigate to http://home/ http://home/ which silently forwards traffic to http://home.box:8442/ http://home.box:8442/
kayson 4y ago
See also: * homer - https://github.com/bastienwirtz/homer https://github.com/bastienwirtz/homer * heimdall - https://github.com/linuxserver/Heimdall https://github.com/linuxserver/Heimdall * dashmachine - https://github.com/rmountjoy92/DashMachine https://github.com/rmountjoy92/DashMachine * flame - https://github.com/pawelmalak/flame https://github.com/pawelmalak/flame In a slightly different vein: * netdata - https://github.com/netdata/netdata https://github.com/netdata/netdata * cockpit - https://github.com/cockpit-project/cockpit/ https://github.com/cockpit-project/cockpit/ And then of course there's grafana which is definitely not for the feint of heart. There are so many page-of-bookmarks style dashboards, but if I'm being honest, none of them are all that great. Of the above, I like heimdall the best for its cleanliness and simplicity, but its hardly customizable. I think we'd be much better served by a really well thought-out framework for self-hosted/homelab dashboards with excellent API documentation that has pluggable modules for things like authentication, data sources (e.g. docker, db, config file, service APIs), and the front end. This would allow people to easily build the dashboard with the features they want, and make it even easier for people to contribute a variety of "themes" for endless customization of how things are displayed.
- nyellin 4y ago
  That's the Grafana philosophy but there's a trade-off between creating a customizable framework and creating something that just works out of the box with zero configuration. We've taken the zero config path for Robusta (https://github.com/robusta-dev/robusta https://github.com/robusta-dev/robusta) but we're focused only on kubernetes so it's a bit easier. Over time we're hoping to make it more and more pluggable. (E.g. see our blocks API which defines a visual display format that works for everything from slack messages to web dashboards: https://docs.robusta.dev/master/developer-guide/actions/findings-api.html https://docs.robusta.dev/master/developer-guide/actions/find...)
- whalesalad 4y ago
  netdata is such a magnificent tool
- diftraku 4y ago
  Another one for the list, one that I personally use at home and work: * hajimari - https://github.com/toboshii/hajimari https://github.com/toboshii/hajimari Autodiscovery based on Kubernetes Ingress objects is a really nice feature: you configure the details using labels (name, icon etc.) in case the Ingress is not exactly what you want.
rektide 4y ago
I hope cybercool can become a thing again. The aesthetics here are on point. I also dig the MDI feel. This is nearly a mini-desktop.
voz_ 4y ago
The emojis are killing me, and I don't know why. Maybe I've forgotten how to have fun.
- ethbr0 4y ago
  No. You're just remembering the last time infrastructure "fun" exploded on you, and the time you spent fixing it.
- ninjin 4y ago
  You are not the only one and I would like to think that I am still perfectly capable of having fun. Maybe it is a generational thing, but I find emojis immensely distracting and impairing my ability to read as my eyes will fixate on the emoji first rather than the text itself. Reading documentation recently was pure torture when someone had insisted on sprinkling emojis over it. What is worse, it usually is pure decoration rather than meaning so I am almost tempted to write a tool to rip them out to make reading easier for me.
  - fernmyth 4y ago
    The emojis are colorful, detailed, and unique. They have much higher visual weight than the text, which is black, simple, and regular. In other words, they are objectively distracting.
- sdrothrock 4y ago
  For me, it's that emojis tend to be very high context since they're basically pictograms. They add communication overhead because you have to think about what they mean, and what the writer intends them to mean, and whether those are the same.
- nkrisc 4y ago
  It's because they don't add anything. If you removed them all the page would be no worse.
- porcoda 4y ago
  Same, and I don’t think I’ve forgotten how to have fun. They just add visual noise and don’t really add information. I could see them being used in a disciplined way where the emojis replace text sometimes, but when the emoji is redundant with the text right next to it then there isn’t really much value. They feel like the modern equivalent of web pages in the 90s that would have excessive images like the Under Construction image or the GIF of the spinning siren : visual clutter.
Kaze404 4y ago
Awesome. I was thinking of building something like this, but I'm glad someone's already done it for me! This is going on my homelab for sure.
aparticulate 4y ago
Very nice work. Though, is "homelab" meaningful jargon to people here? I definitely had to google that term.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- tjbiddle 4y ago
  I think so. I understood it immediately; but I've also been dabbling in the self-hosted space for a bit.
- jxf 4y ago
  It was meaningful for me, personally. I don't know that many people who run homelabs, though -- I think it's fallen out of favor somewhat.
  - dinkleberg 4y ago
    Homelabs can be super handy if you want to grow your linux sys admin skills, but since we all use cloud services these days the need for that skill is diminishing. I decommissioned my homelab a couple years back because there was just no longer the need. But there is still a pretty hardcore community around it (just checkout /r/homelab if you have a burning hole in your wallet).
    - Nextgrid 4y ago
      Cloud services (and networking in general) still depend on these low-level skills, plus with the increased scarcity of VC money companies might actually start to be cost-conscious and do things in-house again instead of burning money by offloading it onto the cloud.
- hericium 4y ago
  Yep. Used the term since obtaining used networking hardware for learning. Then some super power-hungry Xeon rack servers. Now I loosely use it to refer to home-stored anything used for learning, fiddling, researching: old laptop which acts as a temporary Kubernetes node, Arduino clones or raspis doing various home automation stuff (even untouched for a long time, t's always work in progress in my mind, so "lab" applies) and some equipment used for hobbies unrelated to CS but very much laboratory-like. It's a fine term.
v-yadli 4y ago
I saw it on the awesome selfhost list, and Dashy seems cool and flexible. To save one more click from the dashboard and allow desktop integration, I now use these: - https://github.com/nativefier/nativefier https://github.com/nativefier/nativefier - https://github.com/filips123/PWAsForFirefox https://github.com/filips123/PWAsForFirefox .. and wrap self-contained apps to be started from the Start Menu, xfce4-appfinder or (no self-contained apps AFAIK) the Android launcher
salmo 4y ago
Seems weird it doesn’t seem to integrate with any TSDB that I can see quickly skimming the site. Maybe I missed it or maybe “home lab” doesn’t mean what I think it means. I have junk emitting metrics from systems and sensors all over my house to InfluxDB (usually via telegraf) and thought this might be a more fun alternative to grafana.
- alias_neo 4y ago
  In attempt to clarify; You would run your TSDB and Grafana _in_ your Homelab, and point to them with this "Dashboard". Homelab is really a term for running your software in-house (at home specifically), in your own server rack, or something that resembles one (See: LackRacks[0]) for those with different budgets. It's a (software) test lab, with the "lab" part presumably coming from "computer lab". I've always thought of "Dashboards" of this kind as a form of intranet page linking to internal services, available to everyone on the network. [0]https://wiki.eth0.nl/index.php/LackRack https://wiki.eth0.nl/index.php/LackRack
agent86 4y ago
For those interested, here is the last discussion about Dashy from when it previously appeared here on 05/08/22. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31284522 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31284522
mmastrac 4y ago
This is pretty cool. If you don't need all the bells and whistles from this (including auth!), I built a homelab status page server that's designed for someone like me that just wants to whip up an SVG in draw.io or diagrams.net and make it semi-interactive: https://github.com/mmastrac/stylus/ https://github.com/mmastrac/stylus/ I use it to keep tabs on a small fleet of equipment and get at-a-glance status for everything.
lobocinza 4y ago
Isn't this bookmarks with extra steps?
- INTPenis 4y ago
  More like a startpage. Remember those? At least here in Sweden in the late 90s and early 2000s startpages were a thing. A lot of people had some sort of startpage setup in their browser, either custom made, or one of the many online ones.
  - cupofpython 4y ago
    and then google happened
  - maccolgan 4y ago
    I still use a custom self-designed startpage. Too bad FF killed support for them and the addon is miserable.
- pkulak 4y ago
  Bookmarks available to everyone on your network seems valuable. Personally, I just add a bunch of A records to my DNS server. Pretty easy to remember that the photos are at photos.domain.com.
- shaky-carrousel 4y ago
  Bookmarks available to anyone in the network and any device, which also show stats for each service. I think all those extra steps are really worthy.
deepspace 4y ago
I would love to see a serverless version of this - a kind of static site generator that takes config.yml and creates pure javascript that draws the homepage elements. Add minification and I can store the homepage as a bookmarklet without having to run a container or other server.

354 points by mmmmkay 4y ago

I find it amazing that these days, when announcing a tool like this, you have to specifically explain that it is self-hosted. I'd expect a "caveat emptor: requires the cloud", but certainly not a "warning: self hosted". What strange times we live in.

tasn 4y ago

Ha, great to see my own project[1] featured there in one of the screenshots. :) 1: www.etesync.com

BrandoElFollito 4y ago

What I love in these posts is that everyone is providing their solution, the solutions have demos, and the demos list super interesting services I did not know and now absolutely need :) Thanks a lot!

joshstrange 4y ago

As someone who has configured a number of products like this I have to say I find it all to be "nerd candy". As in it's a lot of fun to setup but not very fulfilling and I can never change my habits to actually use the dashboard (even ones that can show relevant info about the apps they link to, like up/down speed or other stats). I'd be interested in hearing from people who have set this (or an alternative) up and use it daily/regularly. For me I just always go to myservice.mydomain.com directly. I normally only have to type 2-3 letters before it pops up for me and it's way faster than going to first to a dashboard/launch page, finding my service, and clicking on it.

6ak74rfy 4y ago
One, my URLs look like http://home.box:8442 http://home.box:8442, so they aren’t easy to remember when you have a few devices. Two, I need to communicate the same to my wife and so, if the solution were bookmarking, we’d both have to do those. Tools like Dashy or Flame (the one I use) are great for that.
- acoard 4y ago
  My solution was this was a bookmark folder on Chrome.
  - 6ak74rfy 4y ago
    That’s the thing - I use Firefox, wife uses Safari. One home page internal to our home is perfect.
- suyula 4y ago
  In a similar situation I decided on a reverse proxy using nginx-- I'd just navigate to http://home/ http://home/ which silently forwards traffic to http://home.box:8442/ http://home.box:8442/

kayson 4y ago

See also: * homer - https://github.com/bastienwirtz/homer https://github.com/bastienwirtz/homer * heimdall - https://github.com/linuxserver/Heimdall https://github.com/linuxserver/Heimdall * dashmachine - https://github.com/rmountjoy92/DashMachine https://github.com/rmountjoy92/DashMachine * flame - https://github.com/pawelmalak/flame https://github.com/pawelmalak/flame In a slightly different vein: * netdata - https://github.com/netdata/netdata https://github.com/netdata/netdata * cockpit - https://github.com/cockpit-project/cockpit/ https://github.com/cockpit-project/cockpit/ And then of course there's grafana which is definitely not for the feint of heart. There are so many page-of-bookmarks style dashboards, but if I'm being honest, none of them are all that great. Of the above, I like heimdall the best for its cleanliness and simplicity, but its hardly customizable. I think we'd be much better served by a really well thought-out framework for self-hosted/homelab dashboards with excellent API documentation that has pluggable modules for things like authentication, data sources (e.g. docker, db, config file, service APIs), and the front end. This would allow people to easily build the dashboard with the features they want, and make it even easier for people to contribute a variety of "themes" for endless customization of how things are displayed.

nyellin 4y ago
That's the Grafana philosophy but there's a trade-off between creating a customizable framework and creating something that just works out of the box with zero configuration. We've taken the zero config path for Robusta (https://github.com/robusta-dev/robusta https://github.com/robusta-dev/robusta) but we're focused only on kubernetes so it's a bit easier. Over time we're hoping to make it more and more pluggable. (E.g. see our blocks API which defines a visual display format that works for everything from slack messages to web dashboards: https://docs.robusta.dev/master/developer-guide/actions/findings-api.html https://docs.robusta.dev/master/developer-guide/actions/find...)
whalesalad 4y ago
netdata is such a magnificent tool
diftraku 4y ago
Another one for the list, one that I personally use at home and work: * hajimari - https://github.com/toboshii/hajimari https://github.com/toboshii/hajimari Autodiscovery based on Kubernetes Ingress objects is a really nice feature: you configure the details using labels (name, icon etc.) in case the Ingress is not exactly what you want.

rektide 4y ago

I hope cybercool can become a thing again. The aesthetics here are on point. I also dig the MDI feel. This is nearly a mini-desktop.

voz_ 4y ago

The emojis are killing me, and I don't know why. Maybe I've forgotten how to have fun.

ethbr0 4y ago
No. You're just remembering the last time infrastructure "fun" exploded on you, and the time you spent fixing it.
ninjin 4y ago
You are not the only one and I would like to think that I am still perfectly capable of having fun. Maybe it is a generational thing, but I find emojis immensely distracting and impairing my ability to read as my eyes will fixate on the emoji first rather than the text itself. Reading documentation recently was pure torture when someone had insisted on sprinkling emojis over it. What is worse, it usually is pure decoration rather than meaning so I am almost tempted to write a tool to rip them out to make reading easier for me.
- fernmyth 4y ago
  The emojis are colorful, detailed, and unique. They have much higher visual weight than the text, which is black, simple, and regular. In other words, they are objectively distracting.
sdrothrock 4y ago
For me, it's that emojis tend to be very high context since they're basically pictograms. They add communication overhead because you have to think about what they mean, and what the writer intends them to mean, and whether those are the same.
nkrisc 4y ago
It's because they don't add anything. If you removed them all the page would be no worse.
porcoda 4y ago
Same, and I don’t think I’ve forgotten how to have fun. They just add visual noise and don’t really add information. I could see them being used in a disciplined way where the emojis replace text sometimes, but when the emoji is redundant with the text right next to it then there isn’t really much value. They feel like the modern equivalent of web pages in the 90s that would have excessive images like the Under Construction image or the GIF of the spinning siren : visual clutter.

Kaze404 4y ago

Awesome. I was thinking of building something like this, but I'm glad someone's already done it for me! This is going on my homelab for sure.

aparticulate 4y ago

Very nice work. Though, is "homelab" meaningful jargon to people here? I definitely had to google that term.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
tjbiddle 4y ago
I think so. I understood it immediately; but I've also been dabbling in the self-hosted space for a bit.
jxf 4y ago
It was meaningful for me, personally. I don't know that many people who run homelabs, though -- I think it's fallen out of favor somewhat.
- dinkleberg 4y ago
  Homelabs can be super handy if you want to grow your linux sys admin skills, but since we all use cloud services these days the need for that skill is diminishing. I decommissioned my homelab a couple years back because there was just no longer the need. But there is still a pretty hardcore community around it (just checkout /r/homelab if you have a burning hole in your wallet).
  - Nextgrid 4y ago
    Cloud services (and networking in general) still depend on these low-level skills, plus with the increased scarcity of VC money companies might actually start to be cost-conscious and do things in-house again instead of burning money by offloading it onto the cloud.
hericium 4y ago
Yep. Used the term since obtaining used networking hardware for learning. Then some super power-hungry Xeon rack servers. Now I loosely use it to refer to home-stored anything used for learning, fiddling, researching: old laptop which acts as a temporary Kubernetes node, Arduino clones or raspis doing various home automation stuff (even untouched for a long time, t's always work in progress in my mind, so "lab" applies) and some equipment used for hobbies unrelated to CS but very much laboratory-like. It's a fine term.

v-yadli 4y ago

I saw it on the awesome selfhost list, and Dashy seems cool and flexible. To save one more click from the dashboard and allow desktop integration, I now use these: - https://github.com/nativefier/nativefier https://github.com/nativefier/nativefier - https://github.com/filips123/PWAsForFirefox https://github.com/filips123/PWAsForFirefox .. and wrap self-contained apps to be started from the Start Menu, xfce4-appfinder or (no self-contained apps AFAIK) the Android launcher

salmo 4y ago

Seems weird it doesn’t seem to integrate with any TSDB that I can see quickly skimming the site. Maybe I missed it or maybe “home lab” doesn’t mean what I think it means. I have junk emitting metrics from systems and sensors all over my house to InfluxDB (usually via telegraf) and thought this might be a more fun alternative to grafana.

alias_neo 4y ago
In attempt to clarify; You would run your TSDB and Grafana _in_ your Homelab, and point to them with this "Dashboard". Homelab is really a term for running your software in-house (at home specifically), in your own server rack, or something that resembles one (See: LackRacks[0]) for those with different budgets. It's a (software) test lab, with the "lab" part presumably coming from "computer lab". I've always thought of "Dashboards" of this kind as a form of intranet page linking to internal services, available to everyone on the network. [0]https://wiki.eth0.nl/index.php/LackRack https://wiki.eth0.nl/index.php/LackRack

agent86 4y ago

For those interested, here is the last discussion about Dashy from when it previously appeared here on 05/08/22. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31284522 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31284522

mmastrac 4y ago

This is pretty cool. If you don't need all the bells and whistles from this (including auth!), I built a homelab status page server that's designed for someone like me that just wants to whip up an SVG in draw.io or diagrams.net and make it semi-interactive: https://github.com/mmastrac/stylus/ https://github.com/mmastrac/stylus/ I use it to keep tabs on a small fleet of equipment and get at-a-glance status for everything.

lobocinza 4y ago

Isn't this bookmarks with extra steps?

INTPenis 4y ago
More like a startpage. Remember those? At least here in Sweden in the late 90s and early 2000s startpages were a thing. A lot of people had some sort of startpage setup in their browser, either custom made, or one of the many online ones.
- cupofpython 4y ago
  and then google happened
- maccolgan 4y ago
  I still use a custom self-designed startpage. Too bad FF killed support for them and the addon is miserable.
pkulak 4y ago
Bookmarks available to everyone on your network seems valuable. Personally, I just add a bunch of A records to my DNS server. Pretty easy to remember that the photos are at photos.domain.com.
shaky-carrousel 4y ago
Bookmarks available to anyone in the network and any device, which also show stats for each service. I think all those extra steps are really worthy.

deepspace 4y ago

I would love to see a serverless version of this - a kind of static site generator that takes config.yml and creates pure javascript that draws the homepage elements. Add minification and I can store the homepage as a bookmarklet without having to run a container or other server.