Have you spent all week waiting for the weekend to come? Well, it's here, and that means more Raspberry Pi projects! This weekend, you can sit back, relax, and enjoy some simpler projects to spin up, like Ghostfolio, Linkwarden, and Beszel (which is a new favorite of mine).
Keep tabs on your investments with Ghostfolio
Is now a good time to buy or sell?
Are you into wealth management or portfolio tracking? I'm not, but I probably should be. Nevertheless, your homelab is the perfect place to keep tabs on what your portfolio is doing with Ghostfolio .
Designed as an open source wealth management platform, you'll find a lot of features here. You're able to create, update, or delete transactions, manage multiple accounts, see the ROAI for today, week to date, month to date, year to date, and much more.
Static analysis can help identify risks in your portfolio, and it even ships as a progressive web app with a mobile-first design, so, should you choose to put it behind a reverse proxy, you could check up on your portfolio from anywhere.
Spinning up Ghostfolio is as easy as it is to use, as long as you use Docker in your homelab (which you definitely should ). You'll need to clone the GitHub repository to your local system and run the Docker Compose file from there to get it up and running. Then, you're off to the races to keep up with your budding portfolio.
Build your own bookmark manager with Linkwarden
Stop using your bookmarks bar and use a proper link manager
Linkwarden
Have you ever looked at your bookmarks bar and thought there had to be a better way? Well, there is, and it's Linkwarden. With LInkwarden , you can save, categorize, and preview your bookmarks like never before.
The simple UI shows you all sorts of information at a glance. Instead of just a favicon and truncated title, you'll be able to see the featured image, a longer title, and what website a bookmark is from. On the side, there are both collections and tags that you can use to organize the bookmarks, too.
Opening a link inside Linkwarden gives you a reader view option that strips a lot of the website's UI out and just presents you with the title, images, and text. This can help you read distraction-free, and even allows you to highlight your saved articles to remember certain sections down the road.
While Linkwarden does offer a hosted plan where you can pay for them to host the data, you can also opt to self-host it yourself as the project is fully open source . Simply spin it up on Docker and you'll be ready to start keeping track of all your links better than you ever have before.
See your server stats at a glance with Beszel
Is your storage server running low on RAM?
If you run multiple servers in your homelab, the Beszel might be just the dashboard you've been looking for. I just took a few hours the other day to get Grafana and Prometheus running in my homelab, but now I've started liking the server monitoring that Beszel offers more.
Beszel claims to be smaller and less resource-intensive than other similar dashboards, and offers an easy setup. It can track CPU, memory, and network usage for each Docker or Podman container that you're running, and ships with multiple OAuth2 providers (as well as password authentication).
Automatic backups to S3-compatible storage are available, and there's a REST API if you want to use or update the data in your own scripts or applications. The REST API would be great for building a minimal dashboard using a Raspberry Pi or ESP32 and an E-Ink display.
Since Beszel is designed to have both a hub and agent, you'll be able to add as many servers to it as you want, making it the ideal tool for multiserver monitoring.
To get started, you just have to spin up a simple Docker Compose file and you're ready to start tracking your homelab data. There's also a simple Docker Compose file that you can copy from the Beszel interface and run on any other system in order to spin up agents. It took me about five minutes to get both of my Proxmox nodes, two of my Docker nodes, and both my Ugreen NAS and Unraid storage server into Beszel for monitoring.
Raspberry Pi projects don't always have to be big and scary. While I just completely rebuilt my homelab from the ground up (with new IPs everywhere, fun), sometimes projects can be a quick win. Beszel, for instance, took about 10 minutes to spin up while I was writing this article, and now it's running and keeping track of all of my servers for me.
So, if you've been putting off doing Raspberry Pi projects because you've been thinking they need to all be super complicated, let this be the push you need to get something simple done, like one of this weekend's projects.
