Dashy - Secure Self-Hosted Dashboard

This is a repackaged open source software product wherein additional charges apply for cloudimg support services.

## Overview

Dashy is a popular open source, self-hosted dashboard with over 18,000 GitHub stars and an active community of contributors. 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 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 and secured so a working dashboard is operational within minutes of launch.

## Why This Image vs a Manual Install

Compared to deploying Dashy yourself from source or Docker, this image eliminates the manual Node.js build process, nginx configuration, TLS certificate generation and credential setup. What typically requires multiple steps across package management, reverse-proxy configuration and security hardening is completed for you at image build time. You launch the instance, read your unique credential, and start adding services.

## Application Stack

Dashy is built from source at a pinned stable release and runs as an unprivileged system user under systemd on the Node.js runtime. It is bound to the loopback interface only and fronted by an nginx reverse proxy that terminates TLS and enforces authentication. systemd starts the dashboard and the web server on boot and restarts them on failure, and the memory-heavy build is done for you so there is no toolchain to run yourself.

## Security Hardening

This image follows a defence-in-depth approach with the following hardening measures applied:

• Network isolation: Dashy binds exclusively to the loopback interface and is unreachable from the network directly
• Reverse-proxy enforcement: all external traffic passes through nginx, which enforces HTTP basic authentication on every request before proxying to the application
• Unique credential generation: a cryptographically random administrator password is generated on each instance's first boot; only its one-way bcrypt hash is stored on the server
• No default or shared credentials: nothing usable is baked into the image, so no two deployments share the same login
• TLS by default: a self-signed certificate is regenerated per instance on first boot; port 80 redirects to HTTPS
• Least privilege: the application runs as an unprivileged system user with no elevated permissions
• Automatic restart: systemd monitors both Dashy and nginx and restarts them on failure

Buyers requiring formal compliance documentation should contact cloudimg to discuss specific requirements.

## Ready to Use

Read your credential from the root-only file, open the dashboard in your browser, and start adding your own services. Organise links into sections, choose a theme, enable live status checks, and edit the layout from the built-in visual editor or by editing a single configuration file.

## AWS Integration

Deploy on any EC2 instance type. Use the unauthenticated health endpoint with an Application Load Balancer for availability monitoring. Pair with AWS Certificate Manager and a custom domain to replace the self-signed certificate with a trusted one. Back up your configuration using EBS snapshots or AWS Backup.

## Use Cases

• A single self-hosted start page for a homelab or a team's internal applications and links
• A private, customizable dashboard with live status checks for the services you run in your own account
• A branded landing page that organises bookmarks, tools and admin consoles into one secured view

## cloudimg Support

24/7 technical support by email and chat. Help with deployment, reverse-proxy and TLS termination with your own domain and certificate, dashboard configuration, adding status checks and widgets, and backup planning.

All product and company names are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective holders. Use of them does not imply any affiliation with or endorsement by them.