Over the years I accumulated very many services which I host myself and each of them has it’s own URL:
- 6 websites, mine and my sisters
- 3 instances of home assistant
- Uptime Kuma
- Synology with photos on it
- Matrix server
- Firefox sync
- TinyTinyRSS
- Mastodon
- PeerTube
- PieFed
- Immich
- Open WebUI (for local large language models)
- UniFi (CCTV)
- Baïkal (Cal- and CardDav)
I’m probably forgetting some of them now and I’m planning to host more in the future.
The problem is how to remember all of those URLs or domains. I have a system how I call them, but my extended family can’t really remember them.
I think it’s time for a landing page. Do you guys have any suggestions?
I think you pretty much just now wrote a landing page, you just need to turn those into links and host that page somewhere.
Sure, you could create a database or JSON file with attributes of each thing and use React or Node.js to generate the UI, but that doesn’t seem necessary for a need on this scale - when things change just edit the landing page. I’ve been keeping links to my soft copies of D&D books and stuff with a simple HTML page for years, and I’m a web dev. No need to do work the requirements don’t demand.
I’m lazy, I just use bookmarks and then go to that site and go look at whatever. These sync in FireFox across my devices.
I use flame. It’s super simple and minimalistic. Best part is nothing random moves like homer/ar or whichever.
Heimdall seems to be the popular choice: https://github.com/linuxserver/Heimdall
Static, hand coded html. You can be as pretty as you want to be. A good learning exercise and since it is all static it will be fast and won’t have more security issues.
Or if you want to learn a JS framework, you can also do it that way.
I just hacked a simple HTML page for this, with big mobile friendly buttons.
That page is served by nginx in my server and is my default home page on my phone and desktop.
Hm interesting, no icons and no status indicator. At the same time over time you probably got it into your muscle memory where to press quickly. It’s intriguing.
My requirement with this page is it has to load really fast, because I return to it often while working / browsing. So yeah, it’s really lightweight and easy to maintain, as things come and go. The source is stored in Forgejo! (the “Code” button there).
If you needed some visual cues you could use colour and emojis to add context whilst keeping load times down
I use Flame as a dashboard for users at home
I use organizr. It can use iframes to load the pages which makes for a very integrated experience. It can be a little more complex to get going and get your apps playing nice with the iframes. Also the development on it has slowed down a lot. I’m hoping it gets more love soon, but that alone has me looking for alternatives. There are several others I have seen. I’m looking at Homepage currently.
So far nothing seems better than organizr for my uses.
That’s what I use. It goes under the radar a lot and I don’t know why. I love that it shows me my sabnzb downloads and what streams are happening on Jellyfin at a glance.
I use Jump for guests, Homepage for me, and Organizr for both.
I’ve been using a modified and simplified version of Prismatic Night it’s somewhat basic but I’m pretty happy with it. I’ve got startpages for my personal stuff, one for my wife and her personal stuff, and a couple for work.
Ah personalized ones, also a good idea
Bookmarks are a thing
I have everything in bookmarks but the discoverability of them in my browser is not very good for the rest of the extended family.
Honestly, a landing page for me is just another thing I need to mess with. Bookmarks and using keywords to load them is so easy. Once they’re in a bookmark, I’m just using keywords to get back to wherever they are. Super easy.
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I used to feel much the same way. I had a pile of bookmarks and a couple permanent browser tab groups.
That changed when I tried out Homepage
On top of just putting all the links in one place; it was really nice to combine a bunch of information from each service to view in one place.
Now I can look at a single page and see with a quick glance; what+how many items are queued in Radarr/Sonarr/Lidarr, what’s queued or errored in Tdarr, item count/time/speed in SabNZBD/Qbit, who’s streaming what in Emby, and even CPU/RAM usage across multiple systems. (not pictured)
I’d recommend exploring it, I didn’t think something like this was worth it until I actually tried it myself.
How do you share your managed bookmarks with your wife, father, children, siblings?
I wouldn’t. People can bookmark their own things. Honestly, with browser histories being so readily accessible to recall sites anymore, I feel like isn’t a problem that people struggle with. Probably why you’re not getting much traction here for your specific angle.
Actually I feel there are many very good suggostions here already like:
- Homepage
- Heimdall
- Static page with HTML links and CSS
- homarr
- Flame
- organizr
- Jump
- glance
It’s more than I expected already.
I’m super basic when it comes to dashboard. Spinning up a Heimdall docker container is so insanely easy and it lets me make nice looking links to all my services. Of all the things I’ve spent energy to try and learn to be better at, my dashboard has never been one and maybe it’s time to revisit… But man, it’s just a really quick compose file and one command and it’s there.
Is there a way to categorize the apps or is it just one list? I feel I have to many of them to have just a list.
It’s buttons you click on, arranged in a grid. You can color and arrange them based on groupings. I know you can have some marked “bookmarked” and some that aren’t, and then you’ll only see the bookmarked tabs on your Dashboard’s main listing. I’m actually not sure if there are further ways to delve into grouping. I certainly never bothered. Basic, like I said, lol
That’s pretty much me aswell, besides that I didn’t even spend energy to try and learn others. Simple docker compose, simple ui and easy way to add services.
I am sure there are alternatives that allow for more elaborate setups and fancier things. But for the low effort I put into it, I got a page with some nice buttons with appropriate icons that scales to whatever screen size it’s displayed on. Only additional thing I did was enabled to show some basic info to see if e.g. SABnzbd is downloading something, which was also super easy.
If you want some ideas, there are plenty of examples here:
https://old.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/search?sort=new&restrict_sr=on&q=flair%3APersonal%2BDashboard
https://tchncs.de/en/ has a pretty good landing page.
I use wiki.js in the linuxserver.io flavor. I have 3 URLs for every service I run: public, LAN, and tailscale url. My “homepage” is a big markdown table with links to all the services. It’s not pretty by any means, but it’s very functional
I use Homerr which is really simple, but you could also use Heimdall or some other options here
Im using homarr it works really good and is easy to configure
+1 for Homarr. I didn’t need to learn how to write any configs. Everything can be setup in realtime, in the GUI, and is immediately testable. Homarr brought a homepage down to my skill level.
My only wish is to lock homepages behind user permissions but it’s fine, my family friends don’t intend to explore, just to get to where they’re going.
I think this is possible nowdays.
In that case. Homarr is awesome, no complaints.
I probably won’t retroact this, my family aren’t going to explore and it was more to keep them on their specific homepage and stop them getting lost. New users will be locked to their specific page, I don’t expect they’ll ever go exploring to find out.
Honestly thank you. Been using homarr for a while and had no idea that had a completely new version
Glad to help.
