esh-pfi-infrastructure/stacks/homepage

homepage — the fleet dashboard

ghcr.io/gethomepage/homepage on esh-docker-vm (10.0.50.45:5100), behind Traefik as eshhome / eshhome.esteban.net. Config is plain YAML — no database, no UI-written state — which is why it belongs in this repo like any other stack.

Brought under version control 2026-08-17. Before that it was edited in place on the host, and had accumulated six hand-rolled services.yaml.bak-* files as its only version history. Those were removed; git is the history now. Edit here, then scripts/deploy-stack.sh esh-docker-vm homepage.

How services get on the dashboard

Two paths, and mixing them is the classic failure:

1. Docker label auto-discovery — the default. A stack carries homepage.group= / homepage.name= / homepage.icon= / homepage.description= / homepage.href= labels and appears automatically. conf/docker.yaml wires five engines over plaintext :2375: esh-docker-vm, ana-docker, nh3-docker, ana-ml2, irv-ml1.
2. Manual entries in conf/services.yaml — for anything that is not a labelled container on one of those five hosts: hardware, BMCs, hypervisors, printers, and user-level systemd services (The Booth, Voice Design Studio).

⚠ Never list a labelled container manually — it renders twice. The comments in services.yaml mark which groups are auto-populated (AI ×7, Service Networking, Monitoring). Respect them.

⚠ Labels only apply on container recreate. Changing homepage.group= on a compose file and running restart does nothing; the container must be recreated.

Layout

conf/settings.yaml owns tabs, group order, and column counts — services.yaml owns what exists, settings.yaml owns where it sits. Four tabs: Main, AI, Infrastructure, Toolchain. A group listed in layout: with no members simply renders empty, so a group can look "dead" when its provider host is unreachable rather than when the group is wrong.

Foot-guns found in the 2026-08-17 audit

• HOMEPAGE_ALLOWED_HOSTS matches host and port. The entry 10.0.50.45 does not cover http://10.0.50.45:5100/ — that combination was being rejected with Host validation failed in the container log while the Traefik hostnames worked fine. Fixed 2026-08-17; every host:port the dashboard is reached by needs its own entry. See .env.example.
• The .env was mode 644 with the Plex and Jellyfin API keys in it. Now 600. It is root-owned, so it needs the infra-ops identity to edit — lkraven on this host has password-sudo only.
• Homepage renders client-side. Grepping the served HTML to verify a config change gives false readings — first a stale prerender, then an empty page. GET /api/services is the honest check; it returns the resolved group/service tree. Config edits also need a container recreate, not a restart: a restart keeps the writable layer and its cached render.
• :2375 is plaintext and unauthenticated on all five engines. Fine on a trusted LAN, and unchanged by this commit, but it is real exposure: anything that can reach those ports has full Docker control of that host. docker.yaml carries a commented TLS example for when that stops being acceptable.
• ping: cards can only be judged from esh-docker-vm. Probing them from another box gives false FAILs — ICMP is filtered across some site links. All 34 entries were verified reachable from the dashboard host on 2026-08-17.

2026-08-18 cleanup

Three fixes, all in this stack's config except where noted:

• UltraSeedbox appeared on all four tabs. The bookmark group had no entry in settings.yaml's layout: block at all, and Homepage's documented behaviour is that "if a group has no tab specified (and tabs are set on other groups), services and bookmarks will be shown on all tabs." It now carries tab: Main plus style: row / columns: 4, which also turns eight full-width bars into a compact grid. Any group added without a tab: will do this again — the rule is now written at the top of the layout block.
• Uptime Kuma rendered twice. It was listed manually under Monitoring in services.yaml and labelled homepage.group=Apps on its container. The manual block is gone; the container's label now says Monitoring and carries homepage.siteMonitor. The container was adopted into this repo at stacks/uptimekuma/ in the same commit — it had been running unmanaged.
• Column counts were fiction. Several groups declared more columns than they had members, so the last row of each was mostly dead space (Notes: 1 card in a 4-wide row). Columns now track member counts; see the rule in settings.yaml. Check with GET /api/services, which prints live per-group counts.

The tab bar goes missing after a recreate, then comes back on its own

Status: self-healing, cause not pinned. Do not chase it. After a recreate the client render comes up with no tab bar, no wallpaper and no i18n (the search box shows the raw key search.search), and groups fall back to side-by-side columns. It restores itself with no intervention.

Timing, measured rather than assumed: five minutes is NOT enough — a fresh container was still tab-less at 4m30s, twice. It was observed healthy again after a gap of roughly an hour. So the window is somewhere between those, and docker ps reporting healthy says nothing about it: the container is serving, the page is just wrong.

Practical rule: recreate, then walk away and re-check later. Do not start editing config to fix it — that is how an hour got spent ruling out four causes that were never the cause:

• Not the config. Restoring settings.yaml and services.yaml to their committed versions reproduces it, as does the pre-adoption backup config in /opt/docker-bu/conf/homepage/.
• Not the v2.0.0 release. A throwaway container on v1.13.2 (the last v1) shows identical symptoms, and the image never changed anyway — working and broken containers both report v2.0.0 / rev 17456f2.
• Not PUID/PGID, and not Docker discovery — tested with both, and with the socket unmounted entirely.
• Not a server-side failure. The server-rendered HTML still contains the tab markup, the background URL and useEqualHeights throughout, and GET /api/validate returns []. Whatever is lost, is lost client-side, and with no page error, no failed chunk and no non-200.

If someone does want to pin it: the shape (recovers on a long timescale, no client exception) points at a cache or revalidation window rather than a config fault. Start there, not in this directory.

What it is not — both obvious suspects were tested and cleared:

• Not the config changes above. Restoring settings.yaml and services.yaml to their committed pre-cleanup versions reproduces the breakage exactly. So does the pre-adoption backup config in /opt/docker-bu/conf/homepage/.
• Not the v2.0.0 release. A throwaway container on v1.13.2 (the last v1, 2026-06-09) against the same config shows identical symptoms. The image never changed anyway: the working container and the broken one both report v2.0.0 / rev 17456f2, and only one homepage image exists on the host.

What is known. The server-rendered HTML still contains the tab markup, the wallhaven background URL and useEqualHeights — so settings.yaml is being read and delivered correctly. The loss happens client-side, with no page error, no failed chunk and no non-200 beyond two unrelated Uptime Kuma widget 403s. GET /api/validate returns []. A fresh container never renders tabs here regardless of image version, config version, PUID/PGID, or whether Docker discovery is mounted at all.

Every throwaway container in that list was judged within ~30s of starting, so they were all inside the same window — and that consistency read as a reproduction when it was really the same measurement mistake five times over. This sits alongside the existing warning that docker ps health and a correct render are different questions.

Before/after evidence: ~/booth-data/homepage-cleanup/ on nh3-dev → http://10.100.10.50:8090/b/homepage-cleanup/ (24h TTL).

Theme — Australis Skyfall

The dashboard is themed with Australis Skyfall, the operator-supplied design system (handoff bundle, 2026-08-18). Skyfall is a dual-theme web system built on the OKLCH rebuild of the Australis terminal palette: one lightness law across every chromatic family, all hues cooler than neutral, a Sea neutral ramp that drifts from ice-blue to ocean green as it brightens, and a "calm depth" language of hairline + two-layer shadow on every elevated surface.

theme/ is the source; conf/custom.css is generated

theme/colors.css      vendored VERBATIM from the bundle
theme/layout.css      ditto — radii, the shadow/glow/rail system, motion
theme/typography.css  ditto — families, scale, weights, tracking
theme/fonts/          Supreme 400/500/700 woff2 (Fontshare ITF license)
theme/skyfall.css.in  the Homepage bindings — the only part that is ours
theme/build.py        inlines the fonts + tokens -> conf/custom.css

Do not hand-edit conf/custom.css. Change skyfall.css.in, run python3 stacks/homepage/theme/build.py, then deploy.

Iterating on the theme — do NOT recreate the container

custom.css is fetched per request from /api/config/custom.css, so a CSS change needs a browser reload, nothing more. It does not need a container recreate, and it therefore does not owe the multi-minute layout warm-up described below — that penalty only applies to the full tab/layout render. Conflating the two costs an operator-visible 10 minutes per attempt, which is exactly how the first version of this theme shipped overcooked (operator, 2026-08-19).

Faster still, and the right way to judge a colour change before it touches the live dashboard: inject the candidate CSS into the running page and screenshot it. No deploy, no restart, seconds per iteration.

// playwright, against the live dashboard
await p.goto('http://10.0.50.45:5100/', { waitUntil: 'networkidle' });
await p.addStyleTag({ content: candidateCss });
await p.screenshot({ path: 'preview.png', fullPage: true });

Only build + deploy once the render looks right.

The build exists for one reason: Homepage serves exactly two files out of its config directory, custom.css and custom.js. There is no static route for anything beside them, so a @font-face pointing at a vendored .woff2 would 404 — the face has to arrive inside the stylesheet as a data: URI. That is also why the background image is mounted at /app/public/images instead (see compose.yaml), which is a real static route.

Only Supreme (body/UI) is embedded. A link dashboard has no display type, so Bespoke Sans buys nothing; Victor Mono ships as 2.4 MB TTF statics per cut, which is 30x the whole stylesheet for the handful of latency figures on the cards. Both are named in the font stacks so they resolve if vendored later.

The background is generated, not stock

images/skyfall-aurora.webp came out of Arbo (irv-ml1:8201) via its t2i-ui-background workflow — "abstract full-bleed backgrounds, no subject". Job 13f0891f4e42, seed 26, flux2-klein-9b, 2048x1152, 1.6 MB PNG re-encoded to a 22 KB WebP (smooth gradients compress absurdly well).

Regenerate with a different seed, or reword, via:

curl -s -X POST http://10.100.79.3:8201/workflows/t2i-ui-background/run \
  -H 'content-type: application/json' \
  -d '{"prompt":{"kind":"raw","text":"...","negative":"..."},
       "width":2048,"height":1152,"seed":26}'
# poll GET /jobs/<id>, then GET /artifacts/<id>/0

Note the prompt field is a discriminated union, not a string — a bare string gets a 422. {"kind":"raw","text":...} is the shape.

Two deviations from the system, on the record

1. Skyfall forbids this background. Its rule is "flat semantic surfaces; no photography, no textures", with exactly one permitted decorative motif — a subtle aurora gradient, on hero and empty-state areas only, "never behind body text blocks". A dashboard is a body-text block. The background is here on the operator's explicit instruction to generate one with Arbo, and it is mitigated rather than excused: abstract with no subject, strictly cool temperature per the imagery rule, and held at opacity: 14 so card contrast never pays for it. That opacity is load-bearing, not decoration — the render is brighter than the "mostly empty negative space" brief, and turning it up is what would make the cards fight the ribbon. If it ever reads busy, the system-faithful answer is to drop the image and let --surface-sunken be the canvas.
2. Service icons stay full-colour vendor logos. Skyfall wants one cool, technical icon family. Desaturating every logo from CSS would just make them illegible, so this one is simply not fixed.

Open question

ESH-FileBot (10.0.50.70) is still described as "role TBC" — it responds to ping, but nobody has written down what it does. Worth resolving or removing.