One Dashboard for All Your Self-Hosted Apps

Once you've installed a few apps on a home server — a movie library here, a photo backup there, an ad blocker somewhere else — you hit a small but real problem: every app lives at a different web address, and they're all just numbers. Was the photo app port 2283 or 2823? This guide shows you the fix: a dashboard. It's a single page that holds a clickable tile for every app you run, so you never memorize a port again. We'll cover the dashboard SparkBox already sets up for you, plus a fancier one you can turn on in about a minute if you want to arrange things yourself.

Tested on: a UGREEN DXP4800 Plus and a $7/month Hostinger VPS, both running SparkBox 1.6.193, with Homepage 1.13.1 (built in) and the Homarr 1.62.0 module.

1. The problem: a dozen apps, a dozen port numbers

A self-hosted app is just a program that runs on your own machine instead of someone else's cloud. The catch is that each one answers on its own web address. On a home server those addresses usually look like your server's number followed by a colon and a port — something like 192.168.1.50:8096 for a movie app, a totally different number for your photos, another for downloads.

For one or two apps that's fine. By the time you're running five or ten, it falls apart. You can't remember which port is which, the family can't find anything, and bookmarks pile up into a mess. People quit self-hosting over exactly this kind of small friction — not because the apps are bad, but because reaching them became a chore.

A dashboard solves it in the most boring, effective way possible: it puts every app on one page, each as a labeled tile you click. You bookmark one address — the dashboard — and everything else is a click away.

2. What a dashboard actually is (in plain terms)

A dashboard for self-hosted apps is itself just another small app. Its only job is to show a grid of tiles, where each tile is a name, an icon, and a link to one of your other apps. Click the Jellyfin tile, it opens Jellyfin. Click the photos tile, it opens your photos.

The good ones do one extra trick: they talk to Docker (the system that runs your apps under the hood) and notice what's installed, so you don't have to type in every address by hand. Many can also show a little status dot — green when an app is up, red when it isn't — and a few live numbers like how full your disk is.

That's the whole idea. It isn't where your data lives and it isn't doing anything clever with your files — think of it as the doorbell panel for your server, not the house. SparkBox gives you two of these to choose from, and you don't have to pick blindly, because one of them is already running.

3. The one you already have: Homepage

When you install SparkBox, it sets up a dashboard called Homepage automatically as part of its core. You don't enable it, configure it, or even think about it — it's just there, and it fills itself in with the apps you've turned on. Add a movie server and a tile for it shows up; add a download client and that appears too. This is the page SparkBox is steering you toward as your home base.

Homepage reads your running apps straight from Docker, which is how it knows what to list without you editing anything. Under the hood it runs on port 3000, but you don't need to memorize that — SparkBox's own launcher lists every app with a real clickable link, so getting to any of them (Homepage included) is a click, not a number you type.

The trade-off with Homepage is the flip side of its strength. It's wonderful precisely because it's hands-off: it lays itself out and stays out of your way. If you ever want to deeply rearrange it — group apps into custom sections, pin your favorites in a specific order, add a weather widget — that's done by editing text configuration files, which is more of a tinkerer's job than a point-and-click one. For most people the automatic layout is genuinely all they need, and we'd suggest living with it for a week before deciding you want more.

4. The one you can customize: Homarr

If you're the kind of person who likes to arrange your own desk, SparkBox ships a second dashboard you can switch on called Homarr. It does the same core job — one page of tiles for all your apps — but it's built around dragging and dropping. You move tiles where you want them, drop them into groups you name yourself, and resize them, all with your mouse. Nothing to edit by hand.

Like Homepage, Homarr can look at Docker and find your containers, so it can add Jellyfin, your photo app, your download tools and the rest with a click rather than you typing addresses. It also shows live status for each one, so a glance tells you what's up and what's not. It's a small app — it only uses around 100MB of memory — so running it alongside everything else won't weigh your server down.

The one thing to know up front: unlike Homepage, Homarr asks you to set it up the first time you open it. That's a feature, not a snag — it's how you get the drag-and-drop control. Here's exactly what that looks like.

5. How to turn Homarr on

Homarr is an optional module, which means it's off until you ask for it. Turning it on is two short commands. If the idea of a command makes you nervous, that's normal — you're copying two lines, not writing anything, and you can read more about how little terminal you actually need in our beginner guide.

sudo sparkbox enable homarr
sudo sparkbox up

The first line tells SparkBox you want Homarr; the second brings it online with the rest of your apps. Give it half a minute. When it's ready, open Homarr from the SparkBox launcher (it answers on port 7575 if you'd rather go straight there).

On your very first visit, Homarr shows a short onboarding screen to create an admin account. Pick a username and a password of at least 8 characters and you're in. After that, click any empty tile slot to add an app — because Homarr already sees your Docker containers, your existing apps like Sonarr, Radarr and Jellyfin can be dropped in with a single click each. Drag the tiles into the order and groups you like, and that layout is yours. There's a step-by-step walkthrough with screenshots in the Homarr setup guide if you want to follow along.

6. Homepage or Homarr — which fits you

You don't have to choose forever, and you can run both. But here's the honest split so you can pick a starting point:

• Stick with Homepage if you want zero effort. It's already running, it fills itself in, and it asks nothing of you. If "just show me my apps and leave me alone" is the goal, you're done — there's nothing to enable.
• Add Homarr if you enjoy arranging things and want a layout that's truly yours — custom groups, the order you prefer, tiles sized your way — all by mouse instead of by editing files. It's the better pick if fiddling is part of the fun for you.

A reasonable path for most people: live on Homepage for a while, and only switch Homarr on once you catch yourself wishing the tiles were arranged differently. There's no penalty for trying Homarr and going back — disabling a module is as easy as enabling it.

7. The honest limits

A dashboard is a convenience layer, and it's worth being clear about what it is and isn't, so you're not surprised later:

• It doesn't make your apps reachable from outside your home by itself. A dashboard links to your apps; it doesn't open them to the internet. Reaching your server while you're away is a separate job, and the safe way to do it is a private tunnel — see the Tailscale guide.
• It isn't a backup or a safety net. The dashboard holds links, not data. If an app breaks, the tile still points at it — fixing the app is its own thing.
• Homarr needs that one setup step. Homepage is automatic; Homarr asks you to create a login the first time. If you want truly nothing-to-configure, Homepage is the answer and you can skip Homarr entirely.
• Deep Homepage customization means config files. The automatic layout covers most needs, but reshaping it by hand is text-editing work. If that's the part you wanted to avoid, that's the moment to reach for Homarr instead.

None of this is a knock on dashboards — it's just the boundary of the job. Within that boundary, having one page for everything is the single biggest quality-of-life upgrade a small home server gets.

8. Next steps

If you already run SparkBox, you have Homepage right now — open it and bookmark it as your home base. If you'd like the drag-and-drop version, run the two commands above to switch on Homarr and arrange your tiles. And if you haven't set up a server yet, the whole point of SparkBox is that the dashboard, the apps, and the wiring between them are done for you.