Dashboard for the Home Server

One of the main points of our server is that all the applications run locally, on the same URL, but each runs on a different port, which means we have to remember the port.

On a computer this isn't a big problem, since we can save the sites in the bookmarks, but if we want to access from a phone or any other device, it's a different story. 

It's much easier if we only have to remember a single URL and from there, link everything together. 

In this post I'm going to show you 3 different Dashboard options, the ones I think are the best, most intuitive, easiest to use, and most complete. This includes that they can be modified directly from the UI.

• Note: The services are not listed in any particular order of preference

1 - Homarr Dashboard

Homarr definitely takes advantage of the -arr suffix although it isn't directly from the -arr family, but anyway, it does a great job maintaining a pretty clean interface:

To add elements, all we have to do is click 'add service' in the upper right corner and fill in the information:

1.1 - Homarr docker compose

To install homarr on our system, we just need to add the following code to the docker-compose file or in Portainer.

homarr:
  container_name: homarr
  image: ghcr.io/ajnart/homarr:latest
  restart: unless-stopped
  volumes:
    - D:\Server-config\homarr\configs:/app/data/configs
    - D:\Server-config\homarr\icons:/app/public/icons
  ports:
    - '7575:7575'

With this, it will be available at the url http://{IP-Server}:7575/.

1.2 - Homarr Features

It comes with some default service integrations, and simply entering the name will automatically fill in all the information; the rest must be done manually.

Within the dashboard, we can't organize the items (or at least I don't know how).

For minimalist solutions, where we just want direct access from a single interface to all elements, it works great. 

2 - Dashy Dashboard

The second one I'm going to show is Dashy, which is a very complete and fully customizable dashboard. And when I say fully, I mean it , directly from the UI you can change absolutely everything, including all the colors. 

Not to mention, it's available in Spanish.

The amount of customization you can do, even in the items themselves, is crazy. To add elements, you need to enter edit mode and create a section; in that section, you can add items.

These items can be services, web pages, etc.

• Note: The configuration can be imported automatically via a yaml file.

2.1 - Dashy docker compose

To install dashy you only need the following code in your docker-compose:

dashy:
  container_name: Dashy
  image: lissy93/dashy
  ports:
    - 4000:80
  environment:
    - NODE_ENV=production
  restart: unless-stopped

And you will have the dashboard available at http://{IP-Server}:4000/.

2.2 - Dashy Features

Listing all the features is nearly impossible because it has hundreds, starting with different types of views, continuing with widgets, themes, languages, and more.

• Note: Link to the docs.

So I will just specify that it's a very complete system, and if you want to customize 100%, you can. It takes more time to set up than others and its style is not so minimal at first glance, but as I said, it is super customizable. So if you like to invest time and customize everything to your style, I recommend it. 

By the way, the search bar at the top searches the internet , by default on DuckDuckGo, but you can change it to search on Google.

3 - Heimdall Dashboard 

Finally, the last dashboard we're going to look at today is Heimdall, possibly the most popular or well-known of them all here. In this case, it is not as customizable as Dashy, but it is much more intuitive, as you can see in the interface. 

As you can see we can't customize much, just links whether to apps on our server or outside, and when it's time to add new items, there's a long list of supported applications by default.

3.1 - Heimdall docker compose

All we have to configure in docker is the following: 

heimdall:
  image: lscr.io/linuxserver/heimdall:latest
  container_name: heimdall
  volumes:
    - D:\Server-config\heimdall\configs:/config
  ports:
    - 8080:80
    - 4433:443
  restart: unless-stopped

And with this you can now access the url http://{IP-Server}:8080 , keep in mind that port 8080 is very popular in different services, so you may need to change it. I recommend switching to a nearby one like 8081 or 8082 if those are free for you. 

3.2 - Heimdall Features

In Heimdall, the customizations we have are limited. We can have many services and group them by tags. Another option we have is multiple users so each user can modify their own start screen. 

It doesn't have other features such as widgets, statistics or a search bar.

As I mentioned before, it has a ton of automatic integrations with a lot of applications, so you don't have to add them one by one, which can be quite tedious.

4 - Special Mentions

In this post I've mentioned 3 Dashboards out of the hundreds out there. Other very popular ones are:

• Organizerr
• Homerr
• Flame
• And of course, browser bookmarks

Everyone is free to choose whichever they want. Using a Dashboard is by no means necessary; rather, it is a nice addition.

Conclusion

We've seen 3 different Dashboards for our server

Personally, I think Heimdall is the simplest, Homarr is more minimalist and may be useful, and then if you want to invest a lot of time in configuration you have Dashy