Heimdall with Podman

April 07, 2023

Overview

For a while now, I’ve maintained a bookmark folder with links to all of the services I run on my personal network. This works well enough, but it’s becoming a little cumbersome since I’ve been adding services recently. Heimdall is simply a landing page with links to various services. Some links can use API keys and such to provide additional detail about the service directly on the landing page.

Install and setup

Since I use Fedora Server for all of my servers, I’ve also transitioned to using Podman whenever I can. I chose to go this route for Heimdall as well. As usual, LinuxServer is my default source for containers.

# Create directory for configuration
mkdir ~/.config/heimdall-container

# Create Podman container
podman run --detach --name heimdall -e TZ=America/New_York -p 8081:80 -v ~/.config/heimdall-container:/config:Z lscr.io/linuxserver/heimdall:latest

# Generate a systemd file
podman generate systemd --restart-policy=always heimdall > ~/.config/systemd/user/heimdall-container.service

# Enable the systemd file
systemctl --user enable heimdall-container.service

If you have a firewall active on the server, be sure to allow port 8081. Heimdall should now be accessible at localhost:8081. I chose not to open the port for secure connection as this will only be accessible internally. There is a line in the php-local.ini file that you will most likely want to add. The upload file size limit is set fairly low by default in PHP. This will prevent you from uploading most background images you may want to use, but it is a simple fix. Be sure to stop the heimdall container first. Then edit ~/.config/heimdall-container/php/php-local.ini to add the line upload_max_filesize = 30M. Save the file and start heimdall back up. You should now be able to change the background through the settings menu.

Conclusion

This was very easy to setup and is much more user friendly that a list of bookmarks in the browser. The fact that it looks fairly slick is another plus. Really wish I would have done this sooner.