Install Homer in a Container

Homer is a simple, static homepage/dashboard for your homelab services. This is a quick walkthrough for deploying it in a Proxmox LXC.

Create a Proxmox LXC

Create a new LXC using the debian-12-standard_12.2-1_amd64.tar.zst template. Homer is a static site, so it doesn’t need much: 1 core and 512MB of RAM is plenty. Give it a static IP address on whichever VLAN your other homelab dashboards live on, and start the container once it’s created.

Install Homer

Connect to the LXC’s console and log in as root, then install nginx and download the latest Homer release:

apt update
apt install unzip nginx
wget https://github.com/bastienwirtz/homer/releases/latest/download/homer.zip
unzip homer.zip -d /var/www/homer
cd /var/www/homer
cp assets/config.yml.dist assets/config.yml
systemctl start nginx
systemctl enable nginx
nano /etc/nginx/sites-available/homer

Add the following server block:

server {
    listen 80;
    server_name homer;
    root /var/www/homer;
    index index.html;

    location / {
        try_files $uri $uri/ =404;
    }
}

PREFERRED METHOD: Instead of changing the port Homer is configured to listen on, you could also configure a reverse proxy using haproxy or nginx proxy manager.

Test the nginx config, enable the site, and reload:

nginx -t

ln -s /etc/nginx/sites-available/homer /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/
rm /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/default
systemctl reload nginx

Get the LXC’s IP address to confirm you can reach it:

hostname -I

Browse to that IP address and you should see Homer’s default dashboard. From there, edit /var/www/homer/assets/config.yml to add links to your own services. See Homer’s own documentation and config reference for all the available options.