Dashy is the Ultimate Self Hosted Homepage | A Privacy Respecting Dashboard App

what's up guys this is josh one of your lenovo developer advocates and welcome back to another video and today i want to show you guys how easy it is to set up your own personal dashboard for your lab using lenovo so follow along with this video and i'll have you up and running in no time [Music] before we get started i want to cover what exactly dashi is well dashi is a self-hosted dashboard to help you keep your applications and services organized within your lab now we all know setting up your own lab can be fun but once you start diving into different applications and services that you install you can easily lose track of where everything is so dashi is a solution that can help you with this issue so let's go down and get started showing you guys dashi so the first thing you need to do is set up and lenode account which is very easy to set up if you don't have one set up just check down in the description of this video for the link to get started the sign up for lenode is absolutely free and you will receive a hundred dollar credit that you can use for the first 60 days after your account is created so once you have your account set up this is the main dashboard that you'll be greeted with and at this point you need to go through the process of setting up your lenovo and one cool feature about the node they have what they call the marketplace which has a lot of pre-configured servers for you and this allows for a very simple install of the initial server setup process so let me show you guys how to set this up right fast so the first thing we want to do is go over to the marketplace so if we click marketplace uh you'll see it'll pop up with a whole bunch of apps and what you want to do is select the one for what you're trying to do and as you can see all the apps are listed and what we're looking for today is a docker server we want to set up a docker server in order to install dashi and so let's scroll down and find docker all you have to do is select docker and then go down to the bottom and configure the server that you want to set up and down here uh it has some options for you and these are like advanced options you can set up a limited sudo user as soon as you know as soon as this server is brought up it'll create those accounts for you so i'm going to create one i'm going to just name it josh and let me verify let me make sure i type it in properly boom and then now you can also add your ssh public key to the lenovo so you can automatically use key authentication to connect to your server but we're not going to do that currently and then also you can disable root access over ssh if you need to but we're going to skip those steps and scroll down to the bottom and select our image now we're going to use debian 10 for this demonstration uh it's very simple to use you know that's the current version buster and then the next step is selecting a region i'm on the west coast so i'm going to select fremont california which is fine and now you want to set up set your plan and what i'm going to use is a shared cpu and an anode one gigabyte so just select based on your needs for whatever you're going to do with the server once it's set up so boom and then there is a roots password and you want to type that in you definitely want to set a root password for your server and then you can also add other ssh keys as well as attach vlans and then also they have some add-ons like backups and private ips but we're not going to need that for this demonstration so let's go down and hit create lenovo boom and then this will go through the process of setting up that docker server for us it will install the applications you know the repository for docker install docker as well as all its dependencies and then provision the server you know create user accounts and all that stuff and store the server and as i stated this makes the process so much easier by them having that app list so let's wait around for the server to boot up now that our docker server is up let's go down and switch over to the terminal so we can run through and install dash i grabbed the ip address of the lenode so we can ssh into it and i'm just paste it in there but basically all you need is a ip address i'm going to use the root account for this demonstration so let's log into the write fast and this is our first time logging into the server so it needs to add the fingerprint so we can type yes there press enter and it'll permanently add that ip address to our list of known host now let's type in our root account password and press enter and that'll log us into our actual server and let me clear the screen okay in order to get started the first thing you want to do is check the version of docker that you have installed on the system so we can type docker dash dash version and that'll check the version that we have and this just verifies that we have docker installed as you can see the current version is 20.10 that's the current version that's installed on this server for us and if you're new to docker you might want to familiarize yourself with the commands you can also type docker dash h and this will show you the help and it will list out everything that you could do with docker as far as pulling images uh starting dockers or starting containers running containers all that good stuff is right there if you type docker dash h now what we want to do is actually look for the image and the application name is dot uh dashy so we can type docker and then search and like i said you might want to familiarize yourself with the commands for docker but this is the command you can use to search for images in the repository and the application name you just want to type it in uh so dashy and press enter another search for dashi or search for the images and also gives you some information about them uh you can kind of tell by this number i have to have it zoomed in so you guys can fully see but if you look at it right here this kind of breaks it all down all the columns so the first one is the name of the image and this is the image that we're actually looking for it says a dashboard for your home lab but this is the amount of storage so this thing has nine stores so all we have to do is actually copy the name of this image because this is the image that we want to so the command to download it down is docker pull and then we can paste that image name down in here and that'll pull the image down as you can see it'll go through download and extract everything for you in the local repository so once this finishes we'll go down and start up dashi because that's pretty much the last step to get dashi up and running and that's one of the reasons i recommend people check out docker containers because it's the simplest way to actually get some of a lot of these applications installed and hosted on your server everything is self-contained within that docker so you don't have to worry about dependencies because everything is within that container now let's go down the store i dashie server and it's a command i'll uh paste it in just to make it quick so you guys can see how to actually do it and i'll i'll walk through each part of the command before we actually run it but as you can see you run docker run and then dash d stands for detach dash p is the ports dash dash name we're actually naming the docker or the container and then this uh option right here dash dash restore uh equals always and then the actual container that we have pulled down to the system so let's go down and press enter right there and that'll start up our dashi server now that we have it installed and our container running we can switch back over to the browser and go to our dashes so i can show you guys what it's all about and before i switch over i just wanted to show you guys something we use port 8080 now you can use whatever port you want uh the internal port is port 80 but the external port is 8080 so since we're coming from the outside we have to use 80 80. so let's go down and uh switch back over to our browser and pull up the ip address as well as port 8080 so open up a new tab and put put the colon and then eight zero eight zero and press enter and then one thing about dashi when you first spin up the container it has to go through initialization period and it does it runs checks and as well as build the actual server but it won't be slow like this anymore unless you report reboot the server and you have like a new config or something it has to rebuild the actual application now this is dashi as you can see it's very simple to set up that didn't take long at all but this thing has a lot of options this is basically your own little dashboard and let's start over here at the top you have the about right here so you can click on that and that'll actually take you to the project all the information about the project it says dash is the self horse distort page for keeping your running applications and services organized the aim of dashi is to provide an easy to deploy highly customizable and functional dashboard in order to improve productivity and enable easy organization of running services or web links and then it also has some information the sources you know all the other information about dashie so let's press back and then you can also look at the source code and that will actually open up the github so you check out everything about the application it has a whole bunch of documentation for it and you're definitely going to need the documentation in order to customize your server you know fully because a lot of it's done from a configuration file and it's one single configuration file and i'll show you guys some customization to it before i in this video but i'm gonna close that and then just show you a little bit of basic navigation right here you have a search and then right here you know so you can search whatever you know applications you have down here or services and then also uh here are the themes so you can go through and you know select one of their themes that they have built for you and we'll leave it at that because it's a little bit easier on the eyes and you guys should be able to see it a little better and then you can also uh open up the theme configurator and this will allow you to make just some custom changes you can change up the colors you know by using the color codes and all that good stuff now the next thing is the layout so auto and then also you can do the horizontal layout like that and then you can also do the vertical layout and that'll make more sense once you have more services on here uh and then also you could change the size to small or big you know depending on what you wanted or the large version uh but i'll just leave it to default i think it's medium and then now this is where you can configure the server so if you hit the little wrench that'll open up a menu and it you can go through and do all your configurations from here and then you can download the configuration and current configuration as like a backup or something like if you want to make changes locally uh and then upload them back to the server you can do it from there you can also edit the config directly in this location and if we go through here you'll see it it's not that difficult to use uh it's just kind of slow that way in my opinion the way i like to do things is configure the server locally and then upload the changes to the server and i'll show you guys that in a second now they also have a cloud backup and restore you can make backups of it and then also they have some css or custom styling you can add to the server as well uh and it's that theme configurator again like we clicked over there but it's under here as well uh but back to the main menu uh that just kind of links back to the custom styles and the cloud sync that goes over there and you can change the app language uh and also rebuild the application from here and you can also reset local settings uh and right here it's just a pop-up basically saying it's recommended to make backups uh but then the app information you can click on that and that'll give you some app information about it says no uh recent errors detected so you get to go and just some more information to documentation and all that stuff and as you can see we have the most up-to-date version of dashi which is 1.8.6 so let's go down and get out of that and go down and close the wrench and just show you something this is a view switcher so you can use the defaults or you can click on minimal and then if you click on it again you can go to workspace and these are just different ways of actually looking at it and let's change it back to the default but i really like the default that's the way i really like it but that's simple enough now let's get into the configuring of the server and what i want to do is show you guys based on some sample configs that are out there and this is something that i recommend people use when they're trying to learn how to configure this thing because the configuration can be difficult if you've never used the yaml language now let's click back over to the source code and open up the github because i want to go to the documentation and just pull one of the configurations just to make some quick changes to the server and if we come down to the configuration section and one thing i like to click on or one thing i found that they have uh example config so if we click right there that'll open up some example configurations for it if we scroll down you'll see a couple of them and one of them i want to grab is the bookmarks and i'm gonna basically copy all of the raw code and then let's switch back over to the terminal right fast because what we're going to do is stop this dashie and delete the content container and i'm going to show you something cool that you want to set up in order to make the configuration a whole lot easier to rank so back to the terminal and one of the first things we want to do is basically create our own local configuration because if you understand how docker works it's basically its own self-contained mini virtual machine but you can link specific files to the host machine which is the machine that is running on and what we're going to do is create our own local config for on the host computer and then link it to our container that we're going to create so the first thing we want to do is create our yaml file so we can do touch and then what we want to do is put it under our root directory and then we can name it dashi dot yml and that's basically for yaml and press enter boom and that has our configuration file so now let's open it up and modify it right fast so nano uh and then dashi.yaml let's open it up and go down and paste that configuration in there so that's basically what i did was just paste that sample configuration into that location now let's save that configuration um and boom write it out to it now we're good to go but we still have that current container running so let's find out what it is and stop it and this is where your docker understanding comes into play so docker and the way you see running containers is the ps command so docker ps that'll list out running containers as you can see that is our dashy container right there but right here is the id for it so let's copy that because we're gonna need that in order to stop it and remove it so the command to stop it is simply docker and then stop and then let's paste that id in there press enter that'll actually stop that container for us now let's go down and remove it by typing docker uh remove and basically the reason we're removing it is so we can create a new container using that same name so let's press enter that'll kill that and if we run docker ps again you'll see that that container is gone and we don't have to pull down the image because the image is still there so we can type docker images and press enter and you'll see that that container is still there uh so that container is you know is still on the system so we can actually run it again and that's you know i'm only explaining that in case you don't understand daca to darker too well okay so let's go down and start our new container uh using that configuration that we just created and i just wanted to break it out for you again so you guys can see but it's basically the same exact command we used to start it but it's docker run you know detached then the ports and then that same name and then restore it always but the only difference that we added was dash v this is another option so whatever we put in the dashi.yaml file locally under root will apply to the configuration that's within the application so let's go down press enter and that'll start up the container again and let's switch back over to our web browser so you guys can see the changes and all we have to do is refresh the page and this will go through the initialization process again and this time it would use that configuration file that we added to the container and this will obviously give you a starting point when setting up your dashy dashboard and boom and this is super cool you know it basically has all your websites that you would typically go to and you can obviously change this up you know as you go uh or change it up but this is just a starting point to kind of help you get everything set up and if we look at the layout we change up the layout a little bit so you guys can see it you know how it'll look in different ways but you know you got your productivity section you got your social section and that's one thing i forgot to kind of show you guys in the configuration uh if we go to edit configuration the section is basically where you put all your links and stuff so you got your social uh same thing in the productivity like that's that section over there uh it's just broken out that way in the configuration and you'll see it once you you know start playing around with the configuration and you'll get a good understanding of it it's not that difficult to use and configure if you have a little programming experience and you don't have to be like some super programmer to figure it out it's not that difficult it kind of follows all you have to do is change up the names put the links in there and keep the same format and you'll be good to go now i hope you guys enjoyed the video dashi is a super cool dashboard that you guys can set up on your server to stay organized when you're managing a lot of different applications and services within your lab and i know a lot of guys that use these types of dashboards especially if they're in a cyber security field it allows you to keep a track of all your different hosts that you have set up in order to do different testing on and also training so you can hone your cyber security skills but please like share and subscribe to the channel and if you have any questions make sure you leave comments down in the comments below and i hope you guys have a good day and peace [Music] you

Channel: Linode

Views: 817

Keywords: linode, linux, cloud computing, alternative cloud, linux server, open source, sysadmin, open source dashboard app, linode apps, linux server apps, linode dashy, online dashbaord, developer dashboard, server dashboard, server homepage, homepage app, self hosted dashboard, install dashy on server, install dashy on linode, dashy on linode, server apps, linux server dashboard, organize server apps, all server apps in one dashboard, self hosted dash, open source software

Id: XUjCTZjT79I

Length: 22min 3sec (1323 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 10 2021