Organize your Homelab Services with Dashy!

Do you have so many self-hosted services running in your homelab that it's hard to keep track of them all? Do you hate typing the IP/port for each one? You could use DNS, but a nice dashboard would make it easier too! Today I'm setting that up with Dashy, a beautiful and easy to edit homelab dashboard tool. It's not the lightest weight tool in the world, but the look is worth it for me.
Link to the blog post with the full script:
www.apalrd.net...
Feel free to chat with me more on my Discord server:
/ discord
If you'd like to support me, feel free to here: ko-fi.com/apalrd
The icons I mentioned:
-Dashy page dashy.to/docs/...
-Homelab Set github.com/wal...
#homelab #selfhosted #proxmox

[@MrRhysstevens]

Looks like a lot of effort for a bookmark

[@apalrdsadventures]

The fanciest bookmarks!

[@NetBandit70]

succinct

[@aliasname2257]

At first I was like “cmon it’s no more work that the other silly stuff I do on the server”… then I got the script lol

[@josvandenanjerklucht]

solid dude! love you from the first video i watched from you, and tbh i love watching you grow

[@sander-s]

I nowadays have my dashboard in Home Assistant using buttons and “open url” actions. This as I have Home Assistant anyways running.

[@PicSta]

For me, Dashy is too overwhelming. Not saying it's bad, but it's more than you need. I really like Homer for its simplicity and grouping. Also has a good search onboard. Surely, like with all dashboards, that's very subjective.

[@salat]

Tried it once, since it looked nice - as soon as I saw that the docker image is ~500MB, it uses ~450MB RAM (for a dashboard!) and it's slow I deleted it. We ran multiple sites on complete servers with that spec back in the days :) It's slow node bloatware.. Heimdall is a little better, but hey.. isn't some static generated site (using Jakyll, Hugo, etc.) enough?

[@apalrdsadventures]

I use Hugo for my own website (www.apalrd.net), and host it on a CDN. It's definitely a good option for a lot of things. I basically picked from the dashboard choices based on the pretty ui here. I like how it looks, hate nodejs, but now I don't have to touch nodejs after installing it.

[@Trains-With-Shane]

Been using Heimdall for the past 2 years or so. Love that it's constantly adding new API's which can display stats and service specific information on the dashboard itself such as how many containers are monitored and running as reported by Portainer, etc.

[@ougonce]

That's because the Dashy container uses a node program to actually host the thing. If you're willing to spend a an hour or so you can probably just bundle Dashy with your configuration and serve it with Nginx or whatever else you want. The Docker image is just the lazy way of doing it.

[@limebulls]

What’s better Jakyll or Hugo?

[@craigleemehan]

The camera focus and resolution are perfect. I complained last time, so I'm compelled to comment.

[@apalrdsadventures]

Glad you liked it :)

[@smith3244]

What makes you not a fan of docker?

[@themacavelly]

Was just about to ask this same question lol

[@apalrdsadventures]

Containerization as a technology is is fantastic, but the Docker implementation causes a lot of network-level oddities that I'm not a fan of: -It adds a bunch of iptables rules without making it clear in the documentation (i.e. drop all in the forward chain, which can break other applications on the host such as mixing Docker + LXC) -Poor IPv6 support (disabled by default) -Containers don't have their own network address with the default config, so we are back to a layer of SNAT on outbound traffic (masquarade) and inbound DNAT port forwarding / inability to share port numbers with other containers and the host, which is something that should be avoided in modern networks. Macvlan 'solves' this, but LXC solves this better.

[@NetBandit70]

Podman > Docker just sayin

[@smith3244]

@apalrdsadventures I would be curious to see how you do things with lxc/lxd. Personally I prefer podman, in part because I prefer SELinux to apparmor and podman integrates there pretty well. Podman also runs deamonless, supports socket activation and has pretty good user namespace support. It also can run systemd inside. So containers like freeipa are basically a full system. I agree with the iptables rules being opaque with docker. I think podman has this too, but this has not been a major focus for me yet. One day I will finally move to IPv6... The limited prefix size from my ISP is kind of annoying here. If I understood the inability to share port numbers bit: I add another IP (in the same subnet) to my host and bind a few of my containers there. There are not that many services I have overlap ports. HTTP(S) is covered by traefik for me. (I also run haproxy but find that that has issues all the time...). SSH is another service that overlaps for me (gitolite3 and the hosts SSH service).

[@jonathanschober1032]

If you really want your docker containers to act like a VM, yeah totally agree. If you want to abstract that away, (like I do), I’ve got everything running in a kubernetes cluster that I love managing instead. Different values and different goals. And honestly different things people are comfortable with.

[@NetBandit70]

2GB of RAM to serve static content. Remember back in the 90's when you would have a webpage full of links that you made with hotdog and hosted on under your user profile on your ISP's website? Also, your dashy is missing underconstruction.gif

[@jeremiahbullfrog9288]

Back then we had 2GB of RAM to serve all the animated GIFs 🤣

[@apalrdsadventures]

2G of RAM to run V8 and deal with the fact that not compiling your code has real world performance implications

[@Trains-With-Shane]

So why the scoff at Docker and then go through the trouble of having to deal with not only writing a custom script but deploying something that relies on a very specific version of something that, itself, is very fussy with dependencies?

[@LovroOrešković]

I use Homer. Simple static configuration and I like the default look of it.

[@AlSaleh-devlab]

Hello I just want to let you know that I mentioned this video in the episode 8 of my devlab series, and linked to it in my Medium article that accompanied the video.

[@apalrdsadventures]

Thanks!

[@autohmae]

LXC is the bomb ! Unless you want to go more advanced/organized and do Docker/Kubernetes.

[@ATechGuy-mp6hn]

Isn't docker useful for not having messed up dependencies😮

[@apalrdsadventures]

Using containers in general keeps your dependency trees separate. But Docker isn't the only way to do this, LXC containers give you the same virtual isolation. In this case, node.js can install whatever versions it wants in the container and the container is isolated from other systems.

[@craigleemehan]

@apalrd's adventures This is my thinking also. Why do I need a container in a container? I accept I maybe missing something. To me, what docker brings is a simplified scripting setup.

[@QrchackOfficial]

this video is the perfect evidence that javascript was a mistake

[@jakobholzner]

Please show more of the proxmox screen record since it's easier to follow the exact steps you take other than that nice video

[@maxjackson.7533]

Are you a fan of Kubernetes?

[@apalrdsadventures]

I do like it more than Docker, but I'm not running my lab at the scale where I feel Kubernetes would help me.

[@jag5cof]

How can I move objects within a section? That is, let's say I want to move the most recent object a little higher, that is, make it the penultimate.

[@AmrBedair]

dashy has a rebuild button in the ui ;)

[@thehappyskeptic]

Any idea how I can get this to listen for HTTPS traffic? It works fine from NGINX reverse proxy if I use HTTP, but if I use HTTPS i just get a 502 Bad Gateway error. NGINX is using HTTPS SSL via Lets Encrypt in the same manner that lets me access most of my other entities via HTTPS e.g Proxmox, Synology, etc. Unrelated : Always amazes me how any inference someone might prefer LXC over Docker causes the Docker fans to emerge like ghosts in the darkness to defend Docker's honour from the insinuation that it might not be perfect for everyone...

[@Rsm583]

Was able to get dashy running but lost on adding the icons. Can you share the url links for the icons plz

[@apalrdsadventures]

Updated the description with the icon links!

[@salat]

10:35 - end: rev counter finally gave up - listen to engine vs. indicated rpm..

[@torstenschone2795]

Hi, is there any chance to start an openoffice file with Dashy?

[@MarkConstable]

I know, how about setting up all your lab items in a set of web browser bookmark folders. Simple, efficient, job done.

[@champ666ZA]

haha i mean he's not wrong.

[@ernestoditerribile]

Opera Speed dial can be configured similarly. So you got a good point.

[@Qosmio1955]

Yep, that's me. And now that most browsers allow grouping of tabs it is even easier...

[@ougonce]

Simple and efficient, except for the fact that it would only work on a single client. lol

[@MarkConstable]

@@ougonce You mean one user. My bookmarks are synced, so they are available on every computer I use and no one else needs to explore my LAN projects, so it is inherently secure from that POV.

[@jayjarrett5924]

I have been playing around with htis for the past few days. I feel this project is dead with all the open and ignored issues. All I see is huge open issues that have been this way for over a year without any answer from Dashy.

[@TavinWalker]

Why not run docker inside of an LXC container? That's what I do for all my docker containers in Proxmox. One LXC container per docker container.

[@BandanazX]

dude, run podman inside docker

[@klaernie]

that's the point where upgrading to kubernetes with for example talos would be much nicer

[@shephusted2714]

3 monitors and you hate docker too - praise the cyberlord - if you use keys you don't need passwords and then you can ssh into container faster and easier and more securely

[@apalrdsadventures]

I have a working certificate authority setup, currently it's working for mutual TLS but I plan on extending it to SSH keys as well in the long term so I don't need to add my user keys to each new vm/ct.

[@Christos9]

How is Dash better than bookmarks?

[@NetBandit70]

You can put it in a CI/CD pipeline and version control it. It's a $150k/yr job.

[@apalrdsadventures]

And you can share it with multiple people (and it has options in config for some elements to show up for certain users / guest users / ...)

[@MarkConstable]

Someone needs to port Dashy to Deno Fresh before I would even think about it. What's the best PHP based dashboard?

[@rschmidt563]

dashy is nice, nodejs - well - not

[@apalrdsadventures]

gotta love a dependency far in the tree that's like 'version == 12 || version == 14 || version == 16 || version == 17' with no commits in 2 years

[@stephenremillard9462]

Seems more like a dashy problem than a node one in my opinion. (Must use old version of node not maintained).

[@apalrdsadventures]

It looks like at some point, one of the dependencies in the dependency hierarchy (hosted by NPM) was affected by the peacenotwar injection - packages in npm were replaced by their maintainer(s) with print messages and rendered non-functional, breaking software which relied on the latest version of those packages. Someone forked that dependency to the working version, updated their own hierarchy to depend on the fork, and never updated the fork, which depends on specific versions (17 was the latest at the time). This is a fairly unique issue to NodeJS / NPM for allowing this.