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A flexible, customizable, personal dashboard

Command and Control

Article from ADMIN 79/2024

By Holger Reibold

Create your own command center in small infrastructures or test environments with flexible dashboards that control and monitor relevant applications and services.

Many standardized interfaces can be set up for applications on the local network. One of the most popular candidates is Webmin, whose strengths lie in managing legacy company servers. As a tool, though, Webmin is too complex and too powerful for many small environments. Administrators looking for a lightweight dashboard system to manage conveniently the links and entry points to various services will find Dashy [1] an interesting alternative.

Dashy is jam packed with useful functions for creating individual dashboards. It also lets you integrate status checks and use dynamic widgets and user-defined layouts. Dashy is open source, and the developers offer support on GitHub.

Installation

Of the various ways to get Dashy up and running, the easiest way has to be the Docker-based installation. A search in the Docker repository,

docker search dashy

reveals the package you need. In the search results you will find a lissy93/dashy entry. Download this container to your system and launch Dashy:

docker pull lissy93/dashy
docker run -p 8080:80 lissy93/dashy

The environment performs various tests and outputs a success message. The local Dashy installation can be accessed on http://localhost:8080 . Docker is not actually necessary for deployment; instead, you can install Dashy on any standard Linux system. Besides Git, you also need Node.js and Yarn:

git clone https://github.com/Lissy93/dashy.git && cd dashy
yarn
yarn build
start

To design dashboards, you need icons that represent the different areas and links. Dashy comes with a set of standard icons, but if you want to use the correct icons for popular devices (e.g., a Fritz!Box or a specific environment), enter