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.

• All features, one page each
• Source code on GitHub

Questions and feedback are welcome, especially from people moving over from another start page.

I've been building nextDash for a while now and v1.4.0 just landed, so this seems like a good moment to show it here properly.

It's a keyboard-first, self-hosted bookmark dashboard. No accounts, no cloud, no sync service in the middle. You run one Go binary (or one container), it stores everything as plain JSON in a folder you chose, and that's the whole architecture.

What it does

• Keyboard-first. > for search, : for commands, ? for finders, arrows and G+1–9 to move around the grid. 164 shortcuts in total, grouped by function. The mouse is optional.
• Health monitoring. Every bookmark gets uptime checks and dead-link detection, with 30 days of history — so you find out about link rot before you click into a 404.
• Inbox. Clip now, sort later. The browser extension pushes the current tab straight into the Inbox instead of forcing you to pick a category at 1am.
• Local page copies. Keep a local copy of a page so it survives the site going down.
• Widgets. Dashboard blocks next to your bookmark grid (new in 1.4.0).
• Layouts and collections. Default, Compact, Cards, Masonry, Detailed List and Launcher, plus smart collections like Today, Recently opened, Most used and Stale.
• Theming. 74 built-in theme families with dark and light variants, a custom theme editor with live contrast warnings, and 7 font choices. Yes, this is where most of my evenings went.
• Portable data. Full ZIP backup and restore, CSV export, browser HTML import, and imports from Pocket, Pinboard, Raindrop, linkding, Shiori, Linkwarden and Karakeep.
• Outgoing webhooks if you want other tools to react to what happens in your dashboard.
• UI in English, Dutch, German and French.

Running it

yaml

services:
  nextDash:
    image: ghcr.io/jordibrouwer/nextdash:latest
    container_name: nextDash
    ports:
      - "8080:8080"
    volumes:
      - ./data:/app/data
    restart: unless-stopped

It's also in the Unraid Community Applications store. Go 1.24, two dependencies (gorilla/mux and golang.org/x/net), MIT licensed.

What it is not

It's built for personal or small-team use on a network you trust. There's no multi-user account system — if you expose it, put it behind Tailscale, a reverse proxy with auth, or use the optional write token. It's not a read-it-later app with an article reader, and it won't sync to a hosted service, because there isn't one.

Links

• Site and release notes: https://nextdash.cc
• Source: https://github.com/jordibrouwer/nextdash

Happy to answer anything, and genuinely interested in what's missing. The current backlog is widgets for other self-hosted services — the *arr stack, Pi-hole, AdGuard Home — so if you'd want something else in there, this is a good moment to say so.

I've been building nextDash for a while now and v1.4.0 just landed, so this seems like a good moment to show it here properly.

It's a keyboard-first, self-hosted bookmark dashboard. No accounts, no cloud, no sync service in the middle. You run one Go binary (or one container), it stores everything as plain JSON in a folder you chose, and that's the whole architecture.

What it does

• Keyboard-first. > for search, : for commands, ? for finders, arrows and G+1–9 to move around the grid. 164 shortcuts in total, grouped by function. The mouse is optional.
• Health monitoring. Every bookmark gets uptime checks and dead-link detection, with 30 days of history — so you find out about link rot before you click into a 404.
• Inbox. Clip now, sort later. The browser extension pushes the current tab straight into the Inbox instead of forcing you to pick a category at 1am.
• Local page copies. Keep a local copy of a page so it survives the site going down.
• Widgets. Dashboard blocks next to your bookmark grid (new in 1.4.0).
• Layouts and collections. Default, Compact, Cards, Masonry, Detailed List and Launcher, plus smart collections like Today, Recently opened, Most used and Stale.
• Theming. 74 built-in theme families with dark and light variants, a custom theme editor with live contrast warnings, and 7 font choices. Yes, this is where most of my evenings went.
• Portable data. Full ZIP backup and restore, CSV export, browser HTML import, and imports from Pocket, Pinboard, Raindrop, linkding, Shiori, Linkwarden and Karakeep.
• Outgoing webhooks if you want other tools to react to what happens in your dashboard.
• UI in English, Dutch, German and French.

Running it

yaml

services:
  nextDash:
    image: ghcr.io/jordibrouwer/nextdash:latest
    container_name: nextDash
    ports:
      - "8080:8080"
    volumes:
      - ./data:/app/data
    restart: unless-stopped

It's also in the Unraid Community Applications store. Go 1.24, two dependencies (gorilla/mux and golang.org/x/net), MIT licensed.

What it is not

It's built for personal or small-team use on a network you trust. There's no multi-user account system — if you expose it, put it behind Tailscale, a reverse proxy with auth, or use the optional write token. It's not a read-it-later app with an article reader, and it won't sync to a hosted service, because there isn't one.

Links

• Site and release notes: https://nextdash.cc
• Source: https://github.com/jordibrouwer/nextdash

Happy to answer anything, and genuinely interested in what's missing. The current backlog is widgets for other self-hosted services — the *arr stack, Pi-hole, AdGuard Home — so if you'd want something else in there, this is a good moment to say so.

I kept saving bookmarks and never finding them back. And when I did find one it was often dead already. Domain gone, or redirecting to some parked page.

So I made nextDash. Self-hosted, single Go binary, data sits in a folder next to it. No account, nothing leaves your machine.

The part I use most is the health view. It shows what's broken or redirecting, and next to every row it tells you when you last opened it. If I haven't touched a link in two years I just delete it instead of fixing it. You can also mark specific bookmarks as monitored and get uptime history and a webhook when they go down.

Everything else runs on the keyboard. / to search, : for a command palette, number keys to jump between pages.

docker compose, port 8080, mount ./data, import your browser's bookmark export and you're up.

One thing to be clear about: there's no login. It assumes a network you trust. Tailscale or a reverse proxy with auth in front of it, please don't put it straight on the internet.

MIT, started out as a fork of ThinkDashboard.

https://github.com/jordibrouwer/nextdash

It comes packed with features, including 30+ built-in themes (plus custom theme support), a Health view with real-time status checks to instantly spot if a service lags or goes down, an Inbox view to save URLs on the fly and organize them later—and a lot more!

You can check it out and deploy it for your own self-hosted setup here:

https://github.com/jordibrouwer/nextdash