Dashy — Self-Hosted Dashboard for Your Homelab

Introduction

Dashy is a self-hosted, highly customizable start page and dashboard for organizing all your applications, services, and bookmarks in one place. It features a visual config editor, status monitoring, authentication support, and dozens of built-in widgets.

What Dashy Does

• Displays organized sections of links to your self-hosted apps and services
• Monitors service uptime with automatic status checks and visual indicators
• Provides built-in widgets for weather, system stats, RSS feeds, and more
• Supports multiple themes, layouts, and icon packs for full visual customization
• Offers a live config editor with YAML validation and real-time preview

Architecture Overview

Dashy is a Vue.js single-page application served by a lightweight Node.js backend. Configuration is driven by a single YAML file that defines sections, items, widgets, and theme settings. Status checks run client-side or via an optional server-side proxy to avoid CORS issues.

Self-Hosting & Configuration

• Deploy with Docker using a single volume mount for the conf.yml config file
• Edit configuration via the built-in visual editor or directly in YAML
• Enable Keycloak, OAuth, or basic auth for multi-user access control
• Configure status checks per item with custom endpoints and expected responses
• Use environment variables to set NODE_ENV, PORT, and auth secrets

Key Features

• Over 50 built-in widgets including clocks, search bars, crypto tickers, and IP info
• Automatic favicon fetching for all linked services with fallback icon packs
• Multi-page support lets you create separate dashboards for different use cases
• Cloud backup and restore saves your configuration to an encrypted data store
• Keyboard shortcuts and a quick-launch search bar for power users

Comparison with Similar Tools

• Homarr — drag-and-drop focused; Dashy offers more widgets and YAML-driven config
• Heimdall — simpler launcher; Dashy provides status checks and richer customization
• Homer — static YAML dashboard; Dashy adds interactive widgets and visual editing
• Organizr — media server focused; Dashy is a general-purpose dashboard
• Glance — minimal feed dashboard; Dashy has deeper service monitoring

FAQ

Q: How do I add a new service? A: Add an item entry under a section in conf.yml with title, URL, and optional icon. Or use the built-in UI editor to add items visually.

Q: Can I use custom themes? A: Yes. Dashy supports custom CSS, over 30 built-in themes, and community theme packs. You can also create your own color scheme in the config.

Q: Does it work behind a reverse proxy? A: Absolutely. Dashy works behind Nginx, Traefik, or Caddy with standard proxy headers configured.

Q: Is there mobile support? A: The responsive design adapts to mobile screens. You can also add it as a PWA to your home screen.

Sources

• https://github.com/Lissy93/dashy
• https://dashy.to/docs/