Dashy on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS

Dashy is a popular open source, self hosted dashboard for your homelab, servers and applications. It brings all of your links, apps and bookmarks together on one customizable start page, organised into sections with icons, themes, search, keyboard shortcuts, live status checks and a built in visual editor for changing the layout directly from the browser. It is an ideal single front door to everything you run, kept privately on infrastructure you control. This image delivers Dashy fully built from source and secured so a working dashboard is operational within minutes of launch.

Secure by default

Dashy's own built in login is a client side gate that is turned off by default, which would leave an unprotected deployment open to anyone who can reach it. This image does not rely on it. Dashy is bound to the loopback interface only and placed behind an nginx reverse proxy that enforces HTTP basic authentication on every request, and a unique administrator credential is generated on each virtual machine's first boot. Only a one way hash of the password is written to the server, while the plain password is placed in a root only file for the administrator to read. There are no shared or default credentials and nothing usable is baked into the image, so no two deployments are ever the same.

Hardened and ready on first boot

• The dashboard is served over HTTPS on port 443 by nginx, which terminates TLS with a self signed certificate regenerated per VM on first boot, and reverse proxies to Dashy bound to loopback only. Port 80 redirects to HTTPS.
• An unauthenticated health endpoint is provided for load balancer probes; every other path, including the config save endpoint, requires the per instance credential.
• The service runs as an unprivileged system user under systemd for automatic restarts and clean logging.
• A starter dashboard is preloaded so the interface is populated the moment you sign in.

Why cloudimg

cloudimg delivers Dashy built from source and fully patched on a hardened Ubuntu 24.04 LTS base, serving on first boot, with no shared credentials and no memory heavy build to run yourself. Every image passes an automated verification gate and is backed by 24/7 support with a guaranteed 24 hour response SLA.

Licensing

Dashy is open source software distributed under the MIT License, and is free. The cloudimg charge covers packaging, hardening, security patching, image maintenance and 24/7 support. A step by step deployment guide is provided.