A look at linuxserver/Heimdall: 9.3k stars on GitHub, written primarily in PHP, tracked under the UI / UX category. An Application dashboard and launcher
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As the name suggests Heimdall Application Dashboard is a dashboard for all your web applications. It doesn't need to be limited to applications though, you can add links to anything you like.
Heimdall is an elegant solution to organise all your web applications. It’s dedicated to this purpose so you won’t lose your links in a sea of bookmarks.
Why not use it as your browser start page? It even has the ability to include a search bar using either Google, Bing or DuckDuckGo.
Video
If you want to see a quick video of Heimdall in use, go to https://youtu.be/GXnnMAxPzMc
Supported applications
You can use the app to link to any site or application, but Foundation apps will auto fill in the icon for the app and supply a default color for the tile. In addition, Enhanced apps allow you provide details to an apps API, allowing you to view live stats directly on the dashboard. For example, the NZBGet and Sabnzbd Enhanced apps will display the queue size, and download speed while something is downloading.
Supported applications are recognized by the title of the application as entered in the title field when adding an application. For example, to add a link to pfSense, begin by typing "p" in the title field and then select "pfSense" from the list of supported applications.
Installing
Apart from the Laravel 11 dependencies, namely PHP >= 8.4, Ctype PHP Extension, cURL PHP Extension, DOM PHP Extension, Fileinfo PHP Extension, Filter PHP Extension, Hash PHP Extension, Mbstring PHP Extension, OpenSSL PHP Extension, PCRE PHP Extension, PDO PHP Extension, Session PHP Extension, Tokenizer PHP Extension, XML PHP Extension, the only other thing Heimdall needs is sqlite support and zip support (php-zip).
If you find you can't change the background make sure php_fileinfo is enabled in your php.ini. I believe php_fileinfo should be enabled by default, but one user came across the issue on a windows system.
Installation is as simple as cloning the repository somewhere, or downloading and extracting the zip/tar and pointing your httpd document root to the /public folder then creating the .env file and generating an encryption key (this is all taken care of for you with the docker).
cd /path/to/heimdall
cp .env.example .env
php artisan key:generate
For simple testing you could just go to the folder and type php artisan serve
There is also a multi-arch Docker which supports x86-64, armhf and arm64, instructions on how to use them at
https://hub.docker.com/r/linuxserver/heimdall/
Updating
To update your instance, simply clone this repository or download the zip/tar file with the new version and copy it over the old installation.
Search Providers
v2.3.0 added the ability for users to customise the search options.
Options are stored in /storage/app/searchproviders.yaml (/config/www/searchproviders.yaml on docker installs), feel free to rearrange the options, add new ones, delete ones you don't use, etc.
Consider contributing to https://github.com/linuxserver/Heimdall/discussions/categories/search-providers to help others add new ones.
The item at the top of the list Tiles allows you to search for apps on your dashboard by name, this can be helpful when you have lots of icons.
New background image not being set
If you are using the docker image or a default php install you may find images over 2MB won't get set as the background image, you just need to change the upload_max_filesize in the php.ini.
If you are using the linuxserver.io docker image simply edit /path/to/config/php/php-local.ini and add upload_max_filesize = 30M to the end.
Docker and enhanced apps
If you are running the docker and the EnhancedApps you are using are also in dockers, you may need to use the docker networking addresses to communicate with them.
You can do this by using http(s)://docker_name:port in the config section. Instead of the name you can use the internal docker ip, this usually starts with 172.
Languages
The app has been translated into several languages; however, the quality of the translations could benefit from some work. If you would like to improve them, or help with other translations, they are stored in /resources/lang/.
To create a new language translation, make a new folder with the ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 code as the name, copy app.php from /resources/lang/en/app.php into your new folder and replace the English strings.
When you are finished, create a pull request.
Currently added languages are
Breton
Chinese
Danish
Dutch
English
Finnish
French
German
Greek
Hungarian
Italian
Japanese
Korean
Lombard
Norwegian
Polish
Portuguese
Russian
Slovenian
Spanish
Swedish
Turkish
Web Server Configuration
Apache
A .htaccess file ships with the app, however, a lot of apache installations disallow .htaccess files by default.
You will notice this due to some links not working like /settings.
In addition mod-rewrite needs to be enabled if it isn't already.
Fixes & work around options
- Apache global allow .htaccess
Find the AllowOverride None line in your apache configuration and change this to AllowOverride All
- Apache vhost configuration allow .htaccess
In the apache vhost configuration in the <Directory /> block add AllowOverride All
- Add .htaccess content in apache configuration
You can add the full .htaccess into your apache configuration, this way you do not need to allow .htaccess files.
You can even shorten the content of the .htaccess when inserting it into the apache configuration to:
Someone was using the same Nginx setup to both run this and reverse proxy Plex. Plex is served from /web so their location was interfering with the /webfonts.
Therefore, if your fonts aren't showing because you have a location for /web, add the following:
location /webfonts {
try_files $uri $uri/;
}
If there are any other locations that might interfere with any of the folders in the /public folder, you might have to do the same for those as well, however it's a super fringe case.
Reverse proxy
If you'd like to reverse proxy this app, we recommend using our letsencrypt/nginx docker image: SWAG - Secure Web Application Gateway
You can either reverse proxy from the root location, or from a subdomain (subfolder method is currently not supported). For HTTPS proxy, make sure you use the HTTPS port of Heimdall webserver, otherwise some links may break. You can add security through .htpasswd
Per default Heimdall uses the standard certificate bundle file (ca-certificates.crt) to verify HTTPS sites and will ignore additional certificates placed in /etc/ssl/certs. If you wish to use enhanced apps with HTTPS sites that use a self-signed certificate or certs signed with your own local CA, you can override the default bundle:
Create a unified certificate .pem file that contains all CAs and certificates that Heimdall has to verify. For example, if you use both LetsEncrypt and a local CA for your internal apps, concatenate the LetsEncrypt intermediate CA (export via browser) and your local CA cert.pem (or any number of self-signed certs) into one heimdall.pem file.
Place the heimdall.pem into the container (if you use Docker), for example by placing it in the path that you mapped to /config. Make sure that the Heimdall user has read access (chmod a+r).
Set the openssl.cafile setting in /config/php/php-local.ini to your cert bundle:
Restart the container and the Enhanced apps should now be able to access your local HTTP websites. This configuration will survive updating or recreating the Heimdall container.
Allow Internal IP Requests
By default, Heimdall blocks requests to private or reserved IP addresses to mitigate potential security risks such as Server-Side Request Forgery (SSRF). This applies to every URL a user supplies that Heimdall fetches server-side: the website lookup used by the add-item form and icon URLs. The check runs on the initial URL and again on every redirect it returns, so a public address cannot bounce the request to an internal one. You can enable access to internal IPs by setting the ALLOW_INTERNAL_REQUESTS environment variable in your .env file.
Steps to Enable Internal IP Requests
Open your .env file located in the root directory of your Heimdall installation.
Add the following line:
ALLOW_INTERNAL_REQUESTS=true
Setting this to true allows Heimdall to make requests to internal IP addresses (e.g., 192.168.x.x, 10.x.x.x, 127.0.0.1).
Save the file and clear the Laravel configuration cache:
php artisan config:clear
Restart your web server or development server:
php artisan serve
Default Behavior
If the ALLOW_INTERNAL_REQUESTS variable is not set or is set to false, Heimdall will block requests to private or reserved IP addresses and return a 403 Forbidden error.
Important Notes
Enabling internal IP requests may expose your application to SSRF risks if your Heimdall instance is accessible from the internet. Ensure your instance is properly secured and not publicly accessible.
Use this feature only if you trust the internal network and understand the security implications.
Running offline
The apps list is hosted on github, you have a couple of options if you want to run without a connection to the outside world:
Clone the repository and host it yourself, look at the .github actions file to see how to generate the apps list.
Download the apps list and store it as a JSON accessible to Heimdall named list.json
With both options all you need to do is add the following to your .envAPP_SOURCE=http://localhost/ Where http://localhost/ is the path to the apps list without the name of the file, so if your file is stored at https://heimdall.local/list.json you would put APP_SOURCE=https://heimdall.local/
Support
https://discord.gg/CCjHKn4 or through GitHub issues
Donate
If you would like to show your appreciation, feel free to use the link below.
Credits
PHP Framework - Laravel
Icons - FontAwesome 5
JavaScript - jQuery
Colour picker - Huebee
Background image - pexels
Trianglify library - Trianglify
Everyone at Linuxserver.io that has helped with the app and let's not forget IronicBadger for the following question that started it all:
You know, I would love something like this landing page for all my servers' apps
that gives me the ability to pin favourites
and / or search
@Stark @Kode do either of you think you'd be able to rustle something like this up?
License
This app is open-sourced software licensed under the MIT license.
How active is development on linuxserver/Heimdall?
The most recent commit recorded on linuxserver/Heimdall was 13 days ago, based on the GitHub push timestamp. The repository has 627 forks — one of the better signals of community interest.
How does linuxserver/Heimdall compare to other UI / UX projects?
linuxserver/Heimdall is tracked by TopGit in the UI / UX category, with 9.3k GitHub stars and written in PHP. Browse the UI / UX topic page on TopGit to compare it against similar projects by stars and activity.
How many stars does linuxserver/Heimdall have?
linuxserver/Heimdall has 9.3k GitHub stars — refresh the page for the live number, or check github.com/linuxserver/Heimdall. TopGit mirrors GitHub's count but does not claim minute-by-minute accuracy.
Is linuxserver/Heimdall open source?
Yes — linuxserver/Heimdall ships under the MIT license, which makes its source code freely readable (and, depending on license terms, forkable and reusable). Source: github.com/linuxserver/Heimdall.
What is linuxserver/Heimdall?
linuxserver/Heimdall (linuxserver/Heimdall) is a PHP project on GitHub. From the project's own README: An Application dashboard and launcher
Where do I read more about linuxserver/Heimdall?
This TopGit page is a snapshot — the READ ME tab shows the project's own README content (links stripped, images preserved). The GitHub repository at github.com/linuxserver/Heimdall is the definitive source.
Read full README in the tab above.
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