Hey everyone! 👋

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been cooking up something in my homelab that started as a “cool idea” and is now a full-blown system I use daily:
Introducing 🧱 LabPortal — my modular, real-time, self-hosted portal that ties everything together.

What started as a simple dashboard has evolved into a multi-feature control hub with weather, uptime, server stats, project management, sticky notes, calendar, content creation tools, and live visitor analytics. Oh — and it’s all running from my AlmaLinux-powered homelab 💪.

🛠️ Tech Stack Used

Here’s a full breakdown of the tools, languages, and stacks powering LabPortal:

⚙️ Backend

• Python + Flask – Lightweight REST APIs (system info, calendar, uptime)
• PHP – Used for AWStats log parsing and serving live visitor counts
• Shell scripts – Basic system operations & monitoring tasks
• Systemd – For running persistent background services

🌐 Frontend

• TailwindCSS – Clean, responsive styling
• Vanilla JavaScript – Dynamic features like weather, calendar, system data
• Google Fonts (Emoji support) – To make it fun and friendly
• Pure HTML5 + CSS3 – No bloat, just speed

📡 APIs + Services

• OpenWeather API – For the weather widget
• AWStats – Parses unique visitors from raw logs
• Flask CORS – To enable cross-origin access for frontend/backend sync

💾 Storage & Infrastructure

• Mounted network share – All content and media stored under /mnt/media/content
• Cockpit – Server management
• FirewallD – For securing APIs
• Fail2Ban – Brute-force protection
• Nginx/Apache – Hosting public and internal services

📍 Hosting

• AlmaLinux 9 (bare metal)
• Hosted on my own servers in my homelab rack

⚡ Features So Far

Here’s what LabPortal does (so far):

• ✅ Live System Stats: Uptime, load average, and datetime (auto-refreshing)
• ✅ Weather Widget: Live weather, displayed in the top-right
• ✅ Sticky Notes: Leave yourself reminders or in-progress notes
• ✅ Project Dashboard: View active project titles with a clean UI
• ✅ Dynamic Calendar:
  • Highlights the current day in green
  • Days you edit are marked in red
• ✅ Live Visitor Stats:
  • Pulls from AWStats logs for both declinedstudios.com and utubemp3.net
  • Parsed in PHP and displayed live via a custom “Visitors” panel

🧠 Current Development: Content Creation System

The current big feature I’m working on is the Content Creation System. Here’s the vision:

• 📝 Rich-text editor (WYSIWYG)
• 📁 Upload media to /mnt/media/content
• 🗓️ Schedule posts (future support for multi-platform APIs)
• 🏷️ Tag and organize posts
• 🔌 API-ready backend for future Facebook, X/Twitter, YouTube Shorts, and Instagram integrations

Everything is being built in modular panels, so I can move, collapse, or re-order components as needed in future versions. My long-term plan is to have full drag-and-drop module support with persistent layout states.

🧪 What’s Next?

• 🧱 Drag-and-drop layout system for UI modules
• 📊 Basic analytics dashboard (engagement, post stats)
• 🤖 AI-generated hashtags and captions (later, with OpenAI API)
• 🧭 Global search across notes, projects, and media
• ☁️ Optional cloud backup for important configs

💬 Final Thoughts

This isn’t just a dashboard anymore — it’s the heart of my homelab. It’s fun to use, easy to build onto, and 100% mine. I can tweak it, break it, fix it, and learn something new every time.
That’s the beauty of building your own tools.

If you’re into homelabs, dev, or web tech — this is one of those projects worth investing time into. And stay tuned… I might open-source the core framework soon.

Cheers,