Homelab from Zero #12: One dashboard to tie it all together

6/29/2026/6 minutes to read/Tags: homelab-from-zero, homelab, docker

This is part 12 of Homelab from Zero, the finale. In part 11 you captured the whole lab in a single Compose file. You’ve built a lot: an ad blocker, monitoring, HTTPS, remote access, a virtualization platform. Today we give it a front door (one dashboard that links to everything) and look back at how far you’ve come.

Why a dashboard

Your lab now runs a dozen things across clean .home hostnames. That’s great until someone asks “what’s the address for the monitoring page again?” A dashboard is a single home page that lists every service as a clickable tile. You set it as your browser’s start page, share it with the household, and nobody ever has to memorize a URL again.

You already met one in part 3: Heimdall. Now we’ll set it up properly as the real front door to everything.

Step 1: Make sure Heimdall is running

It’s already in your Compose file from part 11. From ~/homelab:

docker compose up -d heimdall

Open it at the clean hostname Caddy gave it back in part 8:

https://heimdall.home

Step 2: Add a tile for each service

In Heimdall, click the orange + in the corner → Add Application. For each service, fill in:

Repeat for every service in the lab:

• Pi-hole → https://pihole.home
• Uptime Kuma → https://uptime.home
• Proxmox → https://192.168.1.74:8006
• Anything else you’ve added along the way

Each one becomes a labelled, icon-fronted tile on your home page.

Step 3: Make it the front door

Two finishing touches turn a page into the page:

1. Set it as your browser’s homepage on every device, so a new tab lands here. Because of Tailscale (part 9), https://heimdall.home works from your phone away from home too, if you set up the MagicDNS tip from that post.
2. Pick a background and title in Heimdall’s settings so it feels like yours, not a default install.

Live tiles: for some services, Heimdall can show live status right on the tile (Pi-hole’s blocked-query count, for instance) using an API key from that service’s settings. Optional, but a nice touch that makes the dashboard feel alive.

Look how far you’ve come

Twelve parts ago you didn’t have a server. Here’s the lab you built, one post at a time:

That’s a genuinely capable, self-hosted homelab: secure, monitored, backed up, reproducible, and reachable from anywhere. The same building blocks scale as far as you want to take them.

What you have now

A single dashboard that is the front door to a complete homelab: every service a click away, shareable with the household, reachable from anywhere. You started from nothing and ended with infrastructure you fully understand, because you built every piece yourself.

What’s next, and I want your input

This was the end of Series 1. Series 2 is already in planning, and I have three directions it could go. I genuinely don’t know which one to write first, so I’m asking.

Track A: Self-hosted apps. Replace cloud subscriptions with services you run yourself: a media server (Jellyfin), a photo library (Immich), a password manager (Vaultwarden), file sync (Nextcloud). Low friction, immediately useful, runs on the exact Docker setup you have now.

Track B: Observability. Your lab is running a dozen things and you’re managing it blind. This track is about seeing everything: Grafana dashboards over Prometheus metrics, centralized logs, automated alerts when something actually matters. Bridges the gap between hobbyist and sysadmin.

Track C: Security and zero-trust. VLANs to isolate IoT devices, a proper firewall (OPNsense), Wazuh for intrusion detection and log analysis, a hardened remote-access setup. The hardest track, the most differentiated, and where homelab skills cross over into real security work.

All three are on the roadmap. What order they run in depends on what you want to build next.

Reply to this email with A, B, or C, or just tell me what you wish existed. I read every reply and it shapes what gets written. Thanks for building along.