Self-hosted dashboards and notifications with Docker

This path bundles eight guides for turning your homelab into a real control panel: a central dashboard for every service, your own push notifications, and daily utilities for monitoring and development, all deployed with Docker. It is the right path if you already have a container or two running and are tired of tracking IPs and ports in a notes app.

What you’ll be able to do

By the end you’ll know how to set up a dashboard that centralizes access and status for your services, run your own push notification server so mobile alerts do not depend on a third party, and automate alerts when a web page changes. The level is beginner: you only need Docker and Docker Compose installed and enough know-how to run a basic container; no prior experience with any of these specific tools is required.

How the path builds

You start by installing Homepage, the most widely used dashboard in the self-hosted world, then try alternatives with different approaches: Homarr, more focused on visual configuration, Heimdall, minimalist and shortcut-driven, and Dashy, highly customizable through YAML. With the dashboard sorted, you move on to notifications: ntfy gives you a minimal HTTP-based push system, and Gotify offers an alternative with its own app and full API. You close with two everyday utilities: IT-Tools, a developer toolbox that keeps you off third-party websites, and changedetection.io, which watches pages and alerts you the moment something changes.

All eight guides are short and hands-on: each one gets the service running with docker compose in a few minutes.