Build the Ultimate Home Lab Dashboard!

A great service to run in your home lab environment is a home lab dashboard. A home lab dashboard allows you to organize and aggregate the services, applications, and other solutions you have running inside your home lab environment without having to save cumbersome browser bookmarks and other means. It provides a centralized portal to share across all the devices you have on the network for easy access to your services. Let's take a look at Dashy, a free an open source solution to create quick and easy, beautiful, and powerful home lab dashboards in just a few minutes.

Introduction - 0:00
What is Dashy? - 1:38
Features of Dashy - 2:23
Getting started deploying Dashy - 3:10
Overview of my Docker host - 3:28
Copying the command and configuring the YAML configuration file - 4:00
Pasting into the command line of the Ubuntu Docker host - 4:28
Verifying the Dashy container is running - 4:58
Browsing out to the URL of the Dashy Docker container - 5:22
Documentation links from the dashboard - 6:00
Reviewing the configuration options in Dashy - themes, layout, item size, etc - 6:18
Getting into configuration mode to add items to the dashboard - 6:50
Adding a new item to the new group - 7:45
Adding status checks, disabling SSL checks, max redirects, accepted HTTP codes, etc - 8:16
Save options and differences between local saves or saving to disk - 8:53
Pointing your Dashy Dashboard items to icons for services - 9:40
Discussing the repo for pulling image files - 10:04
Looking at the example Dashy home lab dashboard - 11:11
Discussing how to open the Dashy home lab dashboard in the browser - 11:25
Concluding thoughts around home lab dashboards - 11:52

If you prefer written form, read my full write up about Dashy home lab dashboard here and how to configure:

[maoryatskan]

I'm using Dashy and it's a great addition to my lab.
More videos like this one please.

[oddduck]

Dashy seems like a great idea for home labs. I have had such issues keeping track of home servers that I almost quit trying to build new labs. I need to get back on the horse to learn Docker and Kubernetes.

[AwesomeOpenSource]

Great video! I love Dashy, and have been using it for a while now! It just keeps getting better! Great work!

[juanmamani]

;an nice toy behind you! Thanks for sharing!

[Weirlive]

having a dashboard is such a great help.. I use Homarr but there are tons of options. Pair this with a reverse proxy and you're rocking in SSL.

[dmitrysozinov]

Sorry, but i got nearly no usefull info from this video. I’d like to know:
What can this dashboard do? Can it store and/or show statistics?
Are there any presets or i need to set everything from scratch every time?
How it compares with Grafana functionality? In what ways it can be better than Grafana?

[AnIdiotAboard_]

These things have come along way but after 20 years of writing my own for this, and 20 years of refinements, the OS versions still have a long way to come, and they will, we live in exciting times, i tryed a few OS ones last year and i was impressed with alot of what they could do. They aint replaced my own yet but its comming.

[geoffreyzziwambazza]

I love finding FOSS home lab dashboards. Thanks for this.

[davidwilliss]

A demo of how this shows status of your home lab services would be nice. This video just showed a bunch of pretty links.

[Lgionr]

I have up on dashboards some time ago. too much tweaking and stuff for nothing Tossed in a basic html with hyperlinks and it's super fast and it does the job.

[Sen.]

I'm a simple man so I've been using Heimdall I'll check out dashy

[reizendecamera]

Thanks for this video! learned something

[rationalbushcraft]

Well it is pretty but I need it to do RDP and VNC connections too and it seems like it only does web page serving. It is cool but could be improved in my opinion.

[smileynetsmileynet]

I keep track of all my services for my home network in my network documentation. I just keep those on my NAS.

[TheKingofparis]

Where can you find the file that Dashy made on the fly? I cant find the conf.yml file

[SwishaMane]

Wish I could figure out how to use widgets and those fancy status updaters for service buttons.

[nonkelsue]

At around 10:30, you are showing how to add a URL for the icon however without showing the URL itself. What URL are you pasting in there?

[Adam-cpdl]

You don't even touch on the widgets which is one of dashy's amazing features I have pihole stats and system monitoring on my dashboard

[pa]

Hello There, Thank you for the video. Just want to check what was installed on the ubuntu box prior to installing Dashy? Is it both docker and docker compose? Thank you

[cloudtrike]

It is your real voice or text to speech? How could you syc audio with your lip