Dashy

What is Dashy?

Dashy builds a launch page from a single YAML config, with dozens of themes, icon options, status checks and a built-in editor. It is the most configurable of the startpage tools and still simple to run.

Best for

A start page you want to theme heavily

Why choose Dashy

Dashy is for the person who wants the start page to look exactly right. It reads a single YAML configuration but exposes an enormous amount of it — dozens of themes, layout options, icon sources, custom CSS, sections, sub-items, keyboard shortcuts and a built-in editor that writes the config for you. It can also show live status for your services, integrate with a widget or two, and run in a multi-user mode where different users see different views. The result is a dashboard that looks like something you designed rather than something you configured, which matters more than it sounds when the page is the first thing you open every day.

Replaces

• Homer
• Homarr
• Heimdall

Key features

• YAML configuration with a built-in editor UI
• Many themes and layouts
• Service status monitoring
• Widgets for weather, notes, charts and more

What to watch out for

The amount of configuration available is also the difficulty: it is easy to spend an evening on themes and icons rather than on anything useful, and the resulting YAML can become long enough to be its own maintenance burden. The optional features — status checks, widgets, authentication — add moving parts and dependencies, so the simple static deployment can quietly become a stateful application. Some features require an API key for a third-party service, which is a reminder that not everything runs locally. Its own auth system is not a substitute for putting it behind a real reverse proxy when it is reachable from outside. Version upgrades occasionally reshape configuration keys.

How to deploy

• Docker with config.yml mounted
• Use the UI editor or edit YAML directly
• Add authentication if exposed

Getting started

Deploy it with the default config first and get one section working before touching themes, because a working page with a link beats a beautiful page that renders nothing. Use the built-in editor to make changes and then export the config, rather than hand-editing a long file as your primary workflow. Keep the config in version control, and store any API keys as environment variables rather than in the file itself. If you enable status checks, confirm they work for unauthenticated endpoints only. If it will be reachable from outside your network, put authentication in the reverse proxy and leave Dashy's own behind it.

Typical setup

A container with the configuration on a persistent volume and a copy of it in version control, since everything about the dashboard lives in that file. Theming and layout are configured once the page already works, not before. Status checks are limited to unauthenticated endpoints, and any API keys are supplied as environment variables rather than committed. If it is reachable beyond the local network, a reverse proxy provides TLS and authentication with the app's own login left behind it. The built-in editor is used to make changes and export them, rather than hand-editing a long file as the primary workflow.

Who should look elsewhere

Do not pick it if you want something working in five minutes with no options — Homer or Flame will get you there faster and stay simpler. Avoid it if you know the theming options will consume time you meant to spend elsewhere. And if several people need their own dashboards, check that the multi-user mode fits before building elaborate per-user views on top of it.

Project health

• GitHub stars: 26,605
• Last code push: 2026-10-01
• Open issues: 18
• Status: actively developed

Figures pulled from the GitHub API and refreshed periodically.