Why people self-host Dashy
Dashy is a flexible start page with many layout and widget options. It fits people who want a personal or household portal that can be customized heavily.
The tradeoff is that broad customization can turn into theme maintenance. Keep configuration in version control and test mobile layouts.
What Dashy does well
- One YAML file describes every section, link, and widget, and a built-in editor can write it for you.
- Status indicators that ping each service and show a green or red dot next to its link.
- Dozens of themes, custom CSS, several layouts, and icon packs including favicons and Font Awesome.
- Widgets for weather, system stats, RSS, and many popular homelab apps, plus multi-page dashboards.
Who Dashy is for
Dashy fits the homelab owner who wants a start page that looks exactly the way they imagine it and does not mind spending an evening on it. It is also a reasonable shared homepage for a household, since it has simple built-in accounts and can hand authentication to Keycloak or another OIDC provider.
Deployment notes
Dashy is listed with support signals for linux, docker. Check the upstream documentation before exposing it to the internet, review authentication defaults, and keep backups outside the primary host.
Run the Docker image and mount your conf.yml. Some changes trigger an app rebuild inside the container, which takes a minute or two and uses a noticeable amount of memory on a small board, so give it 1 GB to be safe. Keep conf.yml in Git: it is the whole dashboard. The built-in login is client-side convenience rather than real security, so put anything sensitive behind your reverse proxy's authentication.
Common questions about Dashy
Dashy or Homepage: which dashboard should I use?
Dashy gives you more visual control and a UI editor. Homepage is lighter, starts faster, and has deeper service widgets. If you care most about looks, try Dashy first. If you want live stats from your containers, try Homepage.
Can I edit Dashy without touching YAML?
Yes. The interactive editor in the UI can add and rearrange items and save back to the config file, provided the file is mounted writable.
Other self-hosted dashboards and start pages apps
- Homepage: Highly configurable dashboard for services, bookmarks, and widgets.
Compare them side by side in the dashboards and start pages category.