Meet Heimdall, Your Homelab Application Dashboard

if you're like me you've been spinning up lots of new services over the last couple of months or maybe even years you've been self hosting services like piehole FreeNAS and maybe even transmission and so far the way that you keep track of these is just a collection of bookmarks and those work great until you need to find those URLs on another machine but what if you can expose a dashboard for all of your home lab services one that you could customize and stylize to your own needs and preferences and what if some of those icons on the dashboards could bring back data to you well that's exactly what the application dashboard that we're gonna look at today does hey welcome back to one techno Tim and today we're gonna talk about Heimdall an application dashboard as a quick reminder I stream every Tuesday Thursday and Saturday so if you want to continue the conversation about home lab services there we can so let's talk about an application dashboard so as I mentioned before the way that I would keep track of all of my services that I'm running at home is just bookmarks or favorites and they were just that just favorites that I added to my browser that I kept but as my collection grew so did my favorites list and most of the time when I opened up a browser I wanted to check out some of my services and see how they were doing so I used to do this with Chrome or Firefox and add a lot of icons to my home page but it was kind of tedious finding icons and making everything look nice and it didn't really follow me wherever I went so that's when I found this application called Heimdall so Heimdall is an application dashboard it allows you to create and manage shortcuts for all of your favorite services it's a nice responsive website that has a long list of applications that are supported onto the box it has this concept of foundation apps that pre-fill a lot of the details for you as well as give you application icons but then it also has this idea of enhanced apps enhanced apps give you the same thing as the foundation apps but they also can connect to api's from your services so this will light up an icon on your dashboard with data so this is really cool for something like pie home you can see how many queries were blocked if you're using plex and totally or totally not sure how it's pronounced you can see how many streams are currently running and if you're running something like transmission or some other torrent client you can see the status of torrent your downloading or uploading so they have a really long list of foundation apps and a pretty good list of enhanced apps an app requests are coming in every day so how do I get this well I'm gonna show you so today in this video I'm gonna show you how to set up Heindel and we're not gonna setup Heindel in the traditional way so we're not gonna install it on a Raspberry Pi or a virtual machine or bare-metal we're gonna install it using docker and then move on to kubernetes using something called Rancher now if you need help setting up dr. Cooper Nettie's and Rancher I've got a complete tutorial that'll walk you through this step-by-step it will have you up and running with docker rancher and kubernetes in about 15 minutes and after we get heimdal setup we'll walk through some of the configuration and configure some of our apps on our dashboard so with that out of the way let's hop right in so we're gonna go out to Linux server dot IO they manage a lot of my favorite docker containers so it's really easy to grab them from here so if we go into documentation we'll scroll down and we'll look for heimdal here it is and we'll see the docker commands right here so if we look at this command we can kind of figure out what they're trying to do it's pretty straightforward so we'll run docker create with an argument flag of name and we'll name it Heimdall then we'll pass in some environment variables so P UID and PG ID this is for permissions next we're gonna pass some environment variable TZ and give it the value of a timezone then we're gonna publish some ports on here so we're gonna expose port 80 on the inside and port 80 on the outside as well as 443 for SSL then we're gonna mount a volume for our config so this is gonna map to the containers config folder back to where we want to store our data so we'll choose this later then we're gonna say we start unless stop so this takes care of any errors is just gonna automatically restart that docker container and this is the origin image name from docker code so if you wanted to spin this up right now with docker we would copy and paste this command we would tailor this for our needs hit enter and we'd spin it up and we'd have hind all running but I'm gonna show you how we can create this kubernetes workload in Rancher and then come back to configuration so once we're in Rancho we'll want to go to global we'll want to go to our cluster and we'll want to go to the default namespace then we'll want to create a new workload so let's deploy a new workload and then we'll translate this docker command to Cooper deployment command so we'll look right here so the name is gonna be Heimdall just will mean this time though the docker image is gonna be Linux server Heimdall so we'll copy that put it here we'll keep the namespace as default okay so we'll need two explosive ports I'm gonna name this one Heimdall HTTP and the container port is gonna be 80 and I'm gonna set this to 8,500 because I'm already using port 80 let's do one more for HTTP 443 I'm gonna choose host port again and let's do 8600 here then we'll add some environment variables so we know one variable is TZ and you want to put your timezone here mine's America slash Chicago and then we'll want to find our user ID so let's add a variable for P UID and then we'll find our user ID so once while in our server we'll type ID - you check note in it mines 1001 and now we'll need to add a group ID and here we'll type ID - gee techno Tim or Mike group and choose 1001 so next we need to set our path so we'll want to make a folder for our heimdal config so student cater I'm doll so we'll make a heimdal folder and in here we'll make a config folder and so here's the path to our heimdal config copy that to our clipboard so let's mount a volume add a volume so I'm gonna choose bind mount a directory from the node this is the easiest choice for me it's name this time doll so the path on the node is on our clipboard and the mount point is right here slash config ok we'll need to change one more thing here and that's our scaling upgrade policy I typically choose kill all pods then start new ok we should be able to launch this now ok so we can see the spinning up let's go into this pod look at events and it's already running ok so we should be able to go out to the psyche address and here it is so this is our heimdal application dashboard it looks pretty plain right now okay so let's start adding some applications so if you remember in a previous tutorial I helped you set a pie hole using docker at kubernetes let's add that so we'll search for the application name we'll go down to pie hole and so what auto-populated some colors and some logos and you notice at the bottom there's the URL there that means it's an enhanced app so we'll look at that in a few but let's name this piehole then we'll set the URL of what we want this launcher to go so for me my piehole Server is 192 168 0.4 slash admin and I don't need to upload a file because we already have a logo and here's the config the optional let's enable this so here we're gonna paste in the URL to our PI whole server I know it says not to paste this if it's different but I'm gonna do it anyways and next we'll click test and we'll see an alert here that it can communicate with the pile API okay say ok let's save and here we go we have a first application ping - heimdal and this is an enhanced application so we can actually see real-time data coming back from the PI whole API and we have a quick launcher to get to pie hole okay so let's add another one let's click on this list icon here and you'll see this update apps list so this is gonna update the internal list of apps that heimdal supports you'll want to click this before you add applications to get the latest updates so we'll click that in our app list is updated so let's add another one let's add Rancher so it is on the list so it's a foundation app but it's not an enhanced app because we don't see an additional configuration for an API but that's a lot better than going out and finding the icons and branding colors myself let's call this Rancher and let's put the URL to our ranch or server and we'll click Save so now we have to so let's add another enhancement so you can see more examples of how this works so I run transmission a BitTorrent client and I actually seed four versions of Linux so it's running all the time and it's seeding Linux so that the next person could get Linux so let's tap into that transmission web UI and pull that data upfront on our app dashboard let's add another one and let's find it in the list transmission there we go so I got my icons I get some branding color call this transmission and the URL import is right here mines 192 168 0 dot 219 and the port of 1991 and so let's configure this optional stuff for the enhanced application so the URL is the same user name techno Tim and my password so this is gonna be the user name and password to the web dashboard on transmission if you're using a different torrent client there's more settings for you to tweak but let's test our transmission client out now click test and here we go we successfully communicated with the API so this means that this button is gonna be enhanced as well it's okay here and save and here you go you can see my transmission client exceeding four things and think that's four versions of Linux and I'm not downloading anything so let's add one more that's not on the list okay let's go into our list let's add one more and let's call the Sophos and we can see here that Sophos isn't on this list we scroll down to the esses we don't see here so this is just gonna be a standard app link so let's select none and here's the URL to myself oh server and so for the hex color we get to choose the background for this logo we can choose green you can choose a different green blue pink but I'm gonna pick this charcoal color now let's find an app icon or the app logo click upload file and here it is right here you want to make sure you pin this so you see it on your dashboard so we'll toggle pin and let's click Save and there we go now we can get to our Sophos XJ firewall you can click this button here so you can pin more items to your dashboard we pinned everyone tor dashboard but you could choose not to pin and then have them on this list where you can pin them this will bring you back to the apps list here you can configure a username and password for your dashboard and here you can create tags so if you have a lot of apps and you want to tag them with different tags and sort and filter them you could do that here and then here we'll see settings so while we're in here we can do a couple of things first let's change our background image so we can choose edit choose a file then we'll choose a background image we'll click Save go back to our apps list and there it is so one thing I did notice is that there's a cap on the upload size for that image I think the PHP dot ini needs to be adjusted to expand the max upload size so let's do that and you can see that here if we try to choose a different background choose file and if you choose one that's over two megabytes and hit save it does nothing so let's fix that real quick so if you go back into your server into your heimdal config folder you mean CD into PHP you'll see a PHP - local ini let's edit that so we'll want to add a line to the end of this to increase the max upload file size so if we do upload underscore max underscore of file size equals 30 that should take care of it then we'll need to go back into Rancher and reset this service so it gets the new configuration so if we go back into Rancher we go into heimdal and we can scale this down to zero let's open up the events okay and we can scale back up to one and it's running so let's go back into heimdal okay let's go back into settings let's choose a background image let's choose that same one click Save and there we go if you want a background image bigger than 30 megabytes which is gigantic you could apply that same configuration but just up the upload sides so as you continue to add services to your home lab you can continue to expand your dashboard here's what my current dashboard looks like it's a nice easy way to see all of my services and it's an added bonus for services that are enhanced the enhanced apps give me a little bit of data to give me a clue as to what's going on with my services and the really nice part about this is this is a web server running inside of my doctor in kubernetes cluster which means I can access this from any device within my house and since I have SSL VPN coming back into my house I can access this from anywhere in the world and you can see that this website is pretty responsive too if I scale down skills really nice and if I scale back up it looks nice so would it look good on something like an iPhone or an Android device and don't worry if you don't see your application listed here out of all of my docker containers this one has updates at least once a week which i think is fantastic it means somebody cares about this and somebody's updating it all the time and if you don't see your application listed they're taking requests for applications all the time as of today they have 88 app requests out there some of these are as foundation apps and some are for enhanced so I highly recommend looking through their app request list to see if your app is listed there and if it's not you just add it as a normal app within your dashboard and check this later but don't forget to update your application lists often don't forget to update Heimdall so what do you think about Heimdall to use an application launcher a home page to manage all of your home lab services or are you still using bookmarks I'd love to know what you're using let me know in the comments section below so I hope you found this video helpful if you did please remember to give it a thumbs up and consider subscribing and as a reminder I stream every Tuesday Thursday and Saturday so if you have a question about this video or any of my other videos hop in my stream and I'd love to have you so thanks so much for watching and until next time Stream on my friends what what is that what came and delivered it all this is crazy yeah totally windows 98 install and it's starting on fire did you get paint no way no way that is awesome no way no way and play do them on it

Channel: Techno Tim

Views: 59,325

Keywords: heimdall, heimdall application dashboard, heimdall application launcher, heimdall dashboard alternative, kubernetes, docker, proxmox, rancher, rancher 2, web dashboard, homelab, self hosted, self hosting, heimdall setup, heimdall configuration, heimdall review, organize docker apps, demo, install heimdall, how to, guide, tutorial, self-hosted, self-hosted dashboard, home server, enhanced apps, foundation apps, web application dashboard, bookmarks, favorites, home screen

Id: PA01Z6-z8Qs

Length: 14min 23sec (863 seconds)

Published: Sat Jun 20 2020