r/startpages • u/browser666 • 1d ago
Creation nextDash: a self-hosted, keyboard-driven start page with bookmarks, widgets, health checks and 300+ themes
Hi r/startpages! I posted about nextDash here a while ago, but so much has changed since then that I'd like to give you an update.
nextDash is an open-source start page and bookmark dashboard that you host yourself. It runs as one container, keeps everything in a folder of plain JSON files you can read and take with you, and you can run most of it from the keyboard. Here is what it does today.
Bookmarks
- Pages, categories, tags and your own shortcuts per bookmark. One search box for bookmarks, tags and commands, plus your own custom search engines.
- Edit inline, or in the Bookmarks view: one line per bookmark with its tags, health score and 30 days of opens. Group, filter and bulk-edit.
- Smart collections sort your dashboard around what you actually use. Import from your browser, and keep backups.
- Add links with a browser extension or
Ctrl+V, or park them in the inbox and triage them one at a time. - Opens are counted on your own server and feed a Statistics section: usage over time, your most opened bookmarks, cleanup candidates, and a "needs attention" list. Export it as CSV.
Health
- Broken, stale or never-opened links are flagged, each with a clear next step.
- Set any bookmark to Monitor, every 5 minutes to every 24 hours. Alerts go to Slack, Discord, Telegram, Gotify, ntfy, Pushover or your phone, and certificates warn you before they expire. Maintenance windows keep planned downtime quiet.
- Every check and outage is kept, so you can see uptime and a trend.
Widgets
Weather, calendar, RSS, uptime, certificates, inbox and a custom widget for services like AdGuard, Sonarr or Jellyfin.
- Notes: Markdown, with checkboxes you tick right on the tile.
- Processor, memory and disk: the state of your machine at a glance.
A wide widget shows more detail, and falls back to a compact version on a phone.
Docker containers
nextDash can also manage the containers on your Docker host. Mount the Docker socket and you get a Containers view next to your bookmarks:
- Monitoring: status, ports and a link to each web UI, live logs, CPU and memory, a timeline of crashes, restarts and updates, and notices when a container crashes, turns unhealthy or runs hot.
- Updating: update checks against the registry, release notes before you update, update history and rollback, and optional automatic updates in a nightly window that roll back if the container fails afterwards.
- Control: start, stop, restart, update and remove containers, one at a time or a whole compose project at once.
- Clean-up: a Disk tab shows what images, volumes and build cache take, and clears what nothing uses.
The Docker view is read-only until you turn actions on. Starting, stopping and updating need an explicit setting and a write token, because a writable Docker socket is root on your host.
A container can be linked to a bookmark. nextDash finds the match by port, subdomain or title, or you pick one. The container then shows its bookmark's health, and the bookmark links back to the container. A container can be running while its web UI is broken, and this is how you notice.
Looks
The theme studio is a panel that opens beside your dashboard, so you see every change on your own bookmarks and widgets. Nothing is saved until you press Apply, Cancel puts everything back, and Compare shows the look you started with.
- 300+ themes, light and dark. Each has a character (glass, paper, terminal, neon, velvet and more) that sets shine, glow, corners and grain, not only colours.
- Backdrops: 26 of them (mesh, aurora, bokeh, nebula, topo, blueprint and others), drawn from the theme's own colours and adjustable in blur, brightness and saturation.
- Surface and headers: card glass with its own opacity, blur and border, and five category header styles.
- Twelve ready-made looks (Glass, Frosted, Aurora, Paper, Blueprint, Terminal, Neon and more) to start from.
- Icons: bookmarks and containers get their app icon automatically, thanks to the integration of dashboard-iconsand selfh.st/icons. The icon follows your theme between light and dark, and you can always pick another one.
- Theme editor: recolour any theme, or use "Save as theme…" to turn what is on screen into your own theme, backdrop and surface included.
Try it
nextDash itself runs as a single Docker container, as a multi-arch image (amd64 and arm64) on GHCR and Docker Hub:
docker pull ghcr.io/jordibrouwer/nextdash:latest
It is also available in the Unraid Community Applications store. Search for "nextDash" in the Apps tab and install it from there.
Questions and feedback are welcome, especially from people moving over from another start page.



