I've been using Homarr as my browser homepage on every device, home and away, for a while now. It works, but it's always felt heavier than it needs to be for what I actually want: a fast landing page with links to everything running in my homelab, plus a couple of live status tiles.
This week I finally sat down and trialed gethomepage as a replacement. It's a single YAML-configured container instead of a database-backed app, which appealed to me. I'd rather edit a text file than click through a settings UI.
Getting it running
Homepage lives as another service in my existing docker-compose stack, config split across a few YAML files: services, bookmarks, widgets, and a docker.yaml that mounts the Docker socket so it can show live container
status right on the tiles. Secrets (API keys, tokens) stay out of the YAML entirely. They live in a .env
file and get passed in as environment variables, so nothing sensitive ends up committed anywhere.
I split it into two tabs: Home and Work. Work holds the handful of links I actually need during the school day; Home is everything else: media, downloads, monitoring, the works.
The rough edges
Not everything went smoothly. A couple of widgets (Proxmox, Mealie) fought me hard enough that I gave up and just kept them as plain links instead of live-status tiles. Sometimes "good enough" beats "correct." I also hit a genuinely strange Proxmox API authentication failure that I never fully ran down; the token tested fine from the command line but Homepage's widget kept getting rejected. Filed away for later.
On the plus side, reordering the layout (Quick Links and my crypto tile up top) just worked, no fighting the config to get there.
What's left
Right now Homepage is still LAN-only. The last piece before it can fully replace Homarr as my actual everywhere-homepage is wiring up remote access properly, so it's reachable the same way whether I'm on my home network or not. Once that's done, Homarr gets retired.
I also added a small XMRig widget pointed at my mining rig's API, so I can see hashrate at a glance. More on that mining setup in a future post.