Dashy – A self-hosted homepage for your homelab | Hacker News Reader

Dashy – A self-hosted homepage for your homelab

github.com

354 pointsmmmmkay57 comments

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* heimdall - https://github.com/linuxserver/Heimdall

* dashmachine - https://github.com/rmountjoy92/DashMachine

* flame - https://github.com/pawelmalak/flame

In a slightly different vein:

* netdata - https://github.com/netdata/netdata

* 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.

I personally use organizr and it works well for me. I was pulled toward it as it has the ability to block specific users access to specific Dockers/links depending on their privileges i give.

fyi, your account/IP/something seems to be shadowbanned (this comment was marked as dead). I vouched for it so others without showdead should be able to see it now.

Probably because it’s a brand new account.

Thanks, like the other commenter stated, brand new account and I might have created it while on a VPN connection

> 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.

I haven't looked into it properly but I think this is a premise of https://sandstorm.io/

No, sandstorm is about getting services to boot/setup with a single click.

Their goal was not a dashboard, they set out to become heroku for self hosted services when they announced it. They do aim for standardized authentication however, I'm guessing you're referencing that.

Perhaps more so than one-click services, Sandstorm is a platform for securely hosting web apps. It succeeded in making apps (called grains) easy to use, but not in making them easy to package or develop.

Sandstorm provides security by sandboxing applications and giving them a capability-based API (via Cap'n Proto RPC over a unix socket) for connecting to the outside world and other grains. Grains can also export capabilities, which would allow for the pluggable modules envisioned by kayson. Sadly, few grains do this as of yet. In my limited experience with this part of Sandstorm, the developer experience is still rough around the edges.

There is also Homarr: https://github.com/ajnart/homarr

Wowzer!

Which one is the best? :-D

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) 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/find...)

netdata is such a magnificent tool

Another one for the list, one that I personally use at home and work:

* 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.

Most are hobby projects that don't even look any good.

I'm using Wiki.js and it's customizable navigation menu is much better with wiki as a starting site.

>And then of course there's grafana which is definitely not for the feint of heart.

If you just want canned dashboards there's so many premade Grafana dashboards that work seamlessly with Prometheus /exporters. If you aren't customizing you can get a lot of mileage out of the premade stuff.

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.

One, my URLs look like 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.

My solution was this was a bookmark folder on Chrome.

That’s the thing - I use Firefox, wife uses Safari.

One home page internal to our home is perfect.

In a similar situation I decided on a reverse proxy using nginx-- I'd just navigate to http://home/ which silently forwards traffic to http://home.box:8442/

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!

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/

I use it to keep tabs on a small fleet of equipment and get at-a-glance status for everything.

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/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

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.

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.

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

I think so. I understood it immediately; but I've also been dabbling in the self-hosted space for a bit.

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.

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).

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.

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.

It's like the ultimate nerd term. Only IT nerds could take a rack of servers and rename it a homelab. :p

My installation in in the top shelf of a closet (server, switch UPS, fiber, RPi, ...).

I call it of course my datacenter.

Even better.. mine is on a rack of shelves and made of consumer hardware (what is a "U"? haha)

It's nothing more than an old PC and a NAS if I'm honest. The "lab" part is all virtual. Does the job though!

I only really use mine for testing different web setups for work at the moment

Unfortunately, yes. But in my opinion a proper "homelab" requires microscopes, lasers, custom glasswork, etc.

That's a different kind of lab =)

Yes. Check out /r/homelab

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

Isn't this bookmarks with extra steps?

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.

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.

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.

and then google happened

I still use a custom self-designed startpage. Too bad FF killed support for them and the addon is miserable.

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

No. You're just remembering the last time infrastructure "fun" exploded on you, and the time you spent fixing it.

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.

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.

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.

It's because they don't add anything. If you removed them all the page would be no worse.

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.

It's like bold, if overused, it's visual noise. It distracts from the message and clutters the view.

It's the new age of the blink tag and marquee text ;)

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.

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.

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

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

1: www.etesync.com

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.

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