Show PVE host system load on Homepage LXC

We have introduced the Homepage project in our previous post. In that post, I have discussed how to build and serve Homepage inside an Alpine LXC. If you are interested, you can find the post here.

This time, I will talk about a different issue. There is a “widget” that allows you to monitor the system load

- resources:
    cpu: true
    cputemp: true
    memory: true
    uptime: true
    disk: /

which looks like this

However, there is a problem. The widget to get system info is hardcoded

cpuinfo = fs.readFileSync('/proc/cpuinfo', { encoding: 'utf8' }).toString().split('\n');

which means that you can only see the stats of Homepage’s own host. In my (and many other people’s) case, Homepage is running inside a LXC running on PVE, which means it is meaningless to show the stats. After all, why do you even bother with the “system load” for a container that only runs Homepage. You will never run out of resources anyway. To show the stats of the PVE host, we need apply some hacks.

This post was originally based on my comments over a GitHub issue. As of now (Mar 3, 2024), Homepage already built in the possibility to monitor another machine. Take a look here. However, it looks like you need some sort of API to report these values from another machine. I am pretty sure you can do this for Proxmox, but I feel this hacky approach is still useful when all you need is the stats of the host.

Hacks

First, let us mount your PVE’s /proc folder to somewhere else, for example, /mnt/proc

# mount /proc to /mnt/proc
mount -t proc proc /mnt/proc

You can add this line to PVE’s /etc/fstab to make it persist.

Next, bind mount /mnt/proc to your LXC that hosts Homepage. Just add this line to the configuration file

lxc.mount.entry: /mnt/proc proc none bind,create=dir

such that this LXC’s /proc will be identical to /mnt/proc which again is the same as the host’s /proc. For some reason, directly mounting the host’s /proc to the LXC will make it non-bootable. This is the reason we have to do it this way.

Now, your Homepage widgets should show your host’s system load.