Host Homepage inside a Alpine LXC

Homepage is a customizable “home page” or “dashboard” that you can host yourself. I have to say the name of the project is really bad. It is very hard to google it, since the vast majority of “homepage” hints will not be this repo.

Screenshot from the README in the official repo.

Again I will cite the repo that hosts many excellent scripts, including one for homepage. However, it only supports a Debian LXC as the host, which, I think, is completely overkill for this case. As a result, I decide to deploy it on Alpine myself.

Alpine LXC

Setting up an Alpine LXC is trivial, so I will not touch any details here. However, I will give an overview on the amount of resources needed in different cases.

Building Homepage from source can max out 2 virtual cores for both OSes. However, giving the LXC more cores do not seem to matter. For example, giving 4 cores to the container, PVE shows max CPU usage is about 50%. I would say just give it 2 cores whenever you set up Homepage for the first time or upgrading. Running the server essentially needs 0 computational power, so just giving it 1 core after building is done.

For RAM, I notice a max RAM usage of about 1 GB when building the package. Note that if the LXC is running out of RAM, the building speed will be severely bottlenecked. So make sure you give the container enough RAM when setting the package up. Personally, I give it 2 GB. When the server is up, my Alpine container uses about 125 MB RAM and Debian surely needs a little more (about 215 MB for my case). Either way, 256 MB should be plenty for hosting.

For disk, the OS of Debian alone requires a lot more space. My installation currently is sitting at 1.6 GB, while Alpine is using less than 500 MB. 1 GB should be more than sufficient for Alpine.

Building Homepage

Here I will directly borrow some codes from tteck’s script.

Download latest release

I once used the git repo as the source and built upon it, but it turned out to be rather tedious. At least in the old time, the devs did not exclude all files resulted from building, so it was a huge pain to clean up the working tree just to git pull. So just download the release tarballs.

Assuming we are setting up for the first time.

RELEASE=$(curl -s https://api.github.com/repos/gethomepage/homepage/releases/latest | grep "tag_name" | awk '{print substr($2, 3, length($2)-4) }')
wget -q https://github.com/gethomepage/homepage/archive/refs/tags/v${RELEASE}.tar.gz
tar -xzf v${RELEASE}.tar.gz
cp -r homepage-${RELEASE} /opt/homepage
rm -rf homepage-${RELEASE} v${RELEASE}.tar.gz

Next we need install npm and optionally pnpm as recommended by the Homepage devs

apk add npm
apk add pnpm --repository=https://dl-cdn.alpinelinux.org/alpine/edge/community

If you want to install pnpm from Alpine’s package manager, make sure use the “community” branch from the “edge” repo. This is currently the only available pnpm from apk.

Note: the pnpm package has been moved to the “community” branch of the “edge” repo other than “testing”.

Next build Homepage

cd /opt/homepage
pnpx update-browserslist-db@latest
pnpm install
pnpm build

Now everything should be fine. Running pnpm start and you should see the page at http://lxc_ip:3000.

Autostart the node server

If you are doing this on Debian, a systemd configuration file will be automatically created and enabled. You do not have to worry about it. However, for Alpine, we have to create the init.d script ourselves.

Let us create a file called /etc/init.d/homepage. Depending on whether you opt for npm or pnpm, the file can be slightly different. For example, with pnpm, we will have

#!/sbin/openrc-run

name=homepage
description="Homepage server"
pidfile=/var/run/homepage.pid
command=/usr/bin/pnpm
command_background="yes"
output_log=/var/log/homepage/output.log
error_log=/var/log/homepage/error.log
work_dir=/opt/homepage

depend() {
    need net
}

start_pre() {
    checkpath --directory --owner root:root --mode 0775 $work_dir /var/log/homepage
}

start() {
    start-stop-daemon --start \
        --exec "$command" \
        --pidfile "$pidfile" \
        --make-pidfile \
        --background \
        -- \
        -C "$work_dir" start
}

stop() {
    start-stop-daemon --stop \
        --pidfile "$pidfile"
}

status() {
    if [ -f /var/run/homepage.pid ]; then
        echo "Homepage server is running"
    else
        echo "Homepage server is not running"
    fi
}

With the help of OpenRC, it is now much easier to handle the script. We are basically using openrc-run to call start-stop-daemon, which in turn will run the node server as a daemon. As starting the Homepage server is pnpm start, but there is no corresponding “stop” commend. Apart from killing node directly, one better solution is to create a “PID file” for the daemon, and then you can use start-stop-daemon --stop --pidfile "$pidfile" to stop the daemon. Here I am using /var/run/homepage.pid. status is just a quick way to tell if the service is already running by checking the PID file. Additionally, with this OpenRC approach, you no longer need to use a switch in the script.

You might have noticed the -C $work_dir start line. This is how you serve a node package from another directory with pnpm. The full command line is pnpm -C /opt/homepage start. However, if you use npm, the corresponding command should be npm start --prefix /opt/homepage. Notice the difference and you should change the command and argument line accordingly for npm.

Now we can do

# to start
/etc/init.d/homepage start
# or
service homepage start
# to stop
/etc/init.d/homepage stop
# or
service homepage stop
# to check status
/etc/init.d/homepage status
# or
service homepage status

systemctl by default will not work here, as Alpine does not use systemd.

The last step, we should add this item to startup, which can be done through

rc-update add homepage default

After reboot, you should see the Homepage server automatically starts. If you run rc-status now, you should see

homepage:~# rc-status
Runlevel: default
 networking                                 [  started  ]
 homepage                                   [  started  ]
 crond                                      [  started  ]
 sshd                                       [  started  ]
Dynamic Runlevel: hotplugged
Dynamic Runlevel: needed/wanted
 localmount                                 [  started  ]
Dynamic Runlevel: manual

You can start customize your homepage now!