Heimdall — Application Dashboard for Your Server

Introduction

Heimdall is an application dashboard built specifically for organizing links to your self-hosted services and web applications. Unlike simple bookmark pages, Heimdall supports enhanced application tiles that can display live data from supported apps like Sonarr, Radarr, Pihole, and others, turning your dashboard into an at-a-glance status page.

What Heimdall Does

• Organizes self-hosted services into a visually clean tile-based dashboard
• Supports enhanced tiles that pull live data from popular self-hosted apps
• Provides drag-and-drop tile arrangement with customizable backgrounds
• Includes multi-user support with separate dashboards per user
• Offers tag-based grouping for categorizing applications by type or purpose

Architecture Overview

Heimdall is a PHP application built on the Laravel framework. It uses SQLite for storing dashboard configuration and tile data. Enhanced application tiles communicate with external service APIs directly from the server to fetch live status information. The frontend uses HTML, CSS, and JavaScript for a responsive tile layout. LinuxServer.io maintains the official Docker image.

Self-Hosting & Configuration

• Deploy via Docker with a config volume for persistent settings and database
• Add applications through the web UI by clicking the add button and selecting an app type
• Configure enhanced tiles by providing the API URL and key for each supported app
• Customize the background image, tile colors, and layout through the settings panel
• Set up multiple users with individual dashboards and access controls

Key Features

• Enhanced application tiles with live data from Sonarr, Radarr, Pihole, and more
• Drag-and-drop tile arrangement for intuitive dashboard customization
• Built-in search bar with configurable search engine for quick lookups
• Multi-user support with individual dashboards and authentication
• Foundation app list with 300+ pre-configured application icons and colors

Comparison with Similar Tools

• Homer — Purely static YAML config; Heimdall has a web UI and enhanced app tiles
• Dashy — Widget-rich with status checks; Heimdall focuses on app-specific data tiles
• Homarr — Docker-aware with container management; Heimdall is simpler with app-level focus
• Homepage — API-driven widgets; Heimdall offers richer per-app integrations out of the box
• Flame — Docker label based; Heimdall provides a full web UI for manual tile management

FAQ

Q: What are enhanced tiles? A: Enhanced tiles connect to app APIs to show live data on the dashboard, like download queue status from Sonarr or blocked query counts from Pihole.

Q: How many apps have built-in support? A: Heimdall includes a foundation list of 300+ applications with pre-configured icons. About 30 of these support enhanced data tiles.

Q: Can I use it as my browser start page? A: Yes. Set Heimdall as your browser homepage for quick access to all your self-hosted services.

Q: Does it auto-discover Docker containers? A: No. Applications are added manually through the web interface. Use Homarr if you need Docker auto-discovery.

Sources

• https://github.com/linuxserver/Heimdall
• https://heimdall.site/