Linux Server Lab | Practical Linux & Server Guides

August 3, 2026

How to Set Up a Home Lab Dashboard with Homepage

Setting up a home lab dashboard solves this, giving you one central landing page linking to and often displaying live status for every service you’ve bu…

After running through this entire series — Pi-hole, Nginx Proxy Manager, Jellyfin, Gitea, Netdata, Grafana — you likely have a growing collection of bookmarks scattered across your browser with no single starting point. Setting up a home lab dashboard solves this, giving you one central landing page linking to and often displaying live status for every service you’ve built.

What Is a Home Lab Dashboard?

A homelab dashboard is a customizable start page, typically self-hosted, that displays links, widgets, and live status information for your self-hosted services in one organized view. Instead of remembering a dozen different IP addresses and ports, you open one page and see everything at a glance — often with real-time widgets showing things like Pi-hole’s blocked query count or your current weather.

Popular Dashboard Options

Homepage A highly configurable, YAML-based dashboard offering extensive widget support for popular self-hosted services (Pi-hole, Proxmox, Jellyfin, and dozens more), configured entirely through simple text files rather than a database-backed admin interface.

Homarr A more visually polished, drag-and-drop dashboard configured primarily through its web interface rather than YAML files, appealing to users who prefer a GUI-driven setup process over editing configuration files directly.

Dashy Another YAML-configured option with a strong emphasis on customization and theming, offering a wide range of visual layouts and status-checking capabilities for linked services.

Installing Homepage with Docker

yaml

version: '3'
services:
  homepage:
    image: ghcr.io/gethomepage/homepage:latest
    ports:
      - '3000:3000'
    volumes:
      - ./homepage-config:/app/config
    restart: unless-stopped

docker compose up -d

Configuring Services

Homepage’s configuration lives in YAML files under the mounted config directory. A basic services entry looks like:

yaml

- Infrastructure:
    - Proxmox:
        icon: proxmox.png
        href: https://192.168.1.10:8006
        widget:
          type: proxmox
          url: https://192.168.1.10:8006
          username: root@pam
          password: your-api-token
- Networking:
    - Pi-hole:
        icon: pi-hole.png
        href: http://192.168.1.20/admin
        widget:
          type: pihole
          url: http://192.168.1.20
          key: your-api-key

Organizing Services into Groups

Structure your dashboard around logical groupings — Infrastructure (Proxmox, Proxmox Backup Server), Networking (Pi-hole, Nginx Proxy Manager), Media (Jellyfin), Development (Gitea), Monitoring (Grafana, Netdata) — making the dashboard genuinely useful for quickly finding whatever you need rather than a flat, unorganized list.

Adding Live Status Widgets

Beyond simple links, many dashboard tools support live widgets pulling real data from your services — Pi-hole’s current block count and percentage, Proxmox’s cluster resource usage, or a weather widget for your location — turning the dashboard from a bookmark page into a real at-a-glance homelab overview.

Setting Up Bookmarks and External Links

Beyond your self-hosted services, most dashboards also support simple bookmark sections for frequently used external sites, letting you consolidate your homelab’s entry point with general browsing shortcuts if you want a single browser homepage covering both.

Securing Your Dashboard

Since your dashboard often displays API keys or tokens needed to fetch widget data, and provides direct links to potentially sensitive admin interfaces (like Proxmox itself), keep it behind your VLAN segmentation or VPN (Tailscale, covered earlier) rather than exposing it publicly, and avoid using it as a substitute for individually securing each linked service.

Making It Your Browser Homepage

Once configured, setting your dashboard’s URL as your browser’s homepage or new-tab page turns every new browser window into an instant homelab overview, reinforcing the habit of checking service status at a glance rather than needing to actively remember to check each service individually.

Final Thoughts

Setting up a home lab dashboard ties together everything built throughout a growing homelab into one organized, at-a-glance starting point. After configuring the dozen or more services covered across this series, a proper dashboard is less a luxury and truly more a necessity for keeping track of everything you’ve built without drowning in scattered bookmarks and forgotten IP addresses.