Dashboard Delight

Simplify the chaos of self-hosted services with Homepage, a customizable dashboard with widgets that put service statistics at your fingertips.

- By Koen Vervloesem

If you're running more than a handful of self-hosted services, having a single dashboard to access all their web interfaces would be nice. Homepage [1] provides a highly customizable application dashboard that integrates with over one hundred services. The Homepage dashboard not only facilitates easy access to services running in Docker [2] or Podman [3] containers, but it also lets you link to the admin pages of devices such as your modem, router, hypervisor, and network attached storage (NAS).

While this might seem like a typical bookmark manager, Homepage offers much more. Widgets can display various service metrics, such as your hypervisor’s CPU and RAM usage, the amount of unread articles in your RSS feed aggregator, and the number of available updates from your container image update notifier. This makes it truly a homepage, giving you a bird's-eye view of all your services.

Installation

For this article, I assume you are running your services within Docker or Podman containers and will be adding Homepage to these containers. I'll use Docker Compose [4] for my setup here, though the same applies to Podman Quadlets [5]. Other Homepage installation options [6] are available as well.

Start by creating a directory for the Homepage container to store its data and configuration:

$ mkdir -p containers/homepage

In your docker-compose.yml file, define a service for Homepage as shown in Listing 1.

In Listing 1, I have specified version 1.1.1 of the container image to make sure that the configuration in this article still works when an update introduces incompatible changes.

Check the releases on the Homepage GitHub repository [7] for breaking changes before defining the latest release in the Docker Compose file.