nextDash

Everyone's bookmarks end up the same way: a bar full of favicons with no labels, folders you never open, and a long tail of links that quietly stopped working years ago.

The problem is not storage. Every browser stores bookmarks perfectly well. The problem is that a bookmark collection is write-only: you add to it constantly, you search it almost never, and nothing in the system ever tells you a link has gone. A site that now redirects to a parked page full of ads looks, to your bookmark bar, exactly like the site you saved.

Hosted tools solve the organising part, but they ask for an account and a copy of your links on somebody else's server. That trade never sat right for something as personal, and as boring, as a list of URLs.

My bookmark bar had become a graveyard, so I built a self-hosted dashboard that tells me which links are already dead.

nextDash starts from that diagnosis: a dashboard you actually open, driven entirely from the keyboard so that using it costs nothing, with a health view that treats link rot as a subject in its own right rather than an afterthought.

Seven things it does that a bookmark bar does not. Everything else in this guide is detail hanging off these.

Worth being honest about before you spend an evening on it. nextDash is opinionated, and the opinions rule some people out.

One container, one folder, one port. No database to provision, no migration to run, no account to create.

services:
  nextDash:
    image: ghcr.io/jordibrouwer/nextdash:latest
    container_name: nextDash
    ports:
      - "8080:8080"
    volumes:
      - ./data:/app/data
    environment:
      - PORT=8080
      # Optional on LAN/VPS - require X-NextDash-Token on destructive API calls:
      # - NEXTDASH_WRITE_TOKEN=change-me-to-a-long-random-string
    restart: unless-stopped

1. Bring it up and open it

   docker compose up -d, then http://localhost:8080. No setup wizard, no login. A quick-start card greets a brand-new install; the tour is always available again from Config -> Help.

2. Bring in what you already have

   Export bookmarks from Chrome, Firefox or Edge as HTML - or, new in v1.4.0, from Pocket, Pinboard, Raindrop, linkding, Shiori, Linkwarden or Karakeep, since they all export the same format. Folders become categories; tags, notes and the saved date all survive the trip.

3. Learn three keys

   > to search, : for commands, ! for the cheat sheet. Everything else can wait.

Three levels of structure, five views. Once these click, the rest of the app is discoverable.

page          a tab across the top - "main", "work", "media". Keys 1-9.
 └─ category  a column heading - "vps", "tools", "reading". Collapsible, sortable.
     └─ bookmark   a row - name, URL, favicon, shortcut, tags, note, health status.
 └─ widget    since v1.4.0 - a block among the categories, one or two columns wide.

A bookmark belongs to exactly one category on exactly one page. Everything else - tags, smart collections, search filters, the inbox - is a view over that structure rather than a second hierarchy. Widgets share the same ordering list as categories, so there is one answer to where anything sits on a page, not two lists that can disagree.

164 shortcuts across a dozen groups - but you need about ten of them to be faster than you were before.

There is one rule holding the whole scheme together: every action on a bookmark is Shift plus a letter. Shift+E edits, Shift+V previews, Shift+L shares, Shift+S always opens config. Bare letters act on the first press. k and j move the highlight.

The first ten

Shortcuts that open sites

Give a bookmark a shortcut - GITHU, JELLY, TOWER - and typing it on the dashboard opens the site. No search box, no Enter. The project's own note: "a shortcut that needs Enter to finish is not much of a shortcut."

There is a real collision problem here, and nextDash handles it honestly. On an install with 200 shortcuts, eight of thirteen everyday words got swallowed mid-word by instant opening. So there are three modes under Config -> Behavior -> Search: open instantly (the default), open after a short pause, or require Enter. The default was changed to require Enter in one release and changed back in the next - "making Enter the default treated a rare collision as the normal case."

Six entry points, one bar. The key you press decides what the bar searches.

The filter syntax

Typed straight into the search bar, with autocomplete after each prefix. A leading minus excludes instead of selects, so "tag:dev -status:pinned" is "dev links I have not pinned."

Your browser's address bar is a search box - v1.4.0

Type the keyword, Tab, a term, Enter, and you land in your bookmarks with the results already on screen. No extension, no dashboard to open first - your browser offers this after one visit. It works because a search now has an address of its own (#search?q=...), so it can be bookmarked or shared like any other view.

Saving has to be cheaper than not saving. Eight manual ways in, and - new in v1.4.0 - sources that keep bringing links in without you asking.

By hand

On their own - Sources - v1.4.0

Config -> Data & backups -> Sources is for the places bookmarks keep arriving from, as opposed to the import buttons above, which read a file once. A source remembers what it already brought in and previews what it would write before writing it.

Import a browser's own bookmark file and - since it is the format Pocket, Pinboard, Raindrop, linkding, Shiori, Linkwarden and Karakeep all export - those come along for free. Export bookmarks (HTML) sits beside the CSV pair, and reads back into any browser.

What happens when you save something twice

Saving a URL already on the same page is refused. A copy on another page becomes a question instead: nextDash names the page and category it is already filed under, offers to open it, and "Save anyway" keeps the second copy - the add form, quick add, the extension and every Source all ask it the same way.

A holding area for links worth keeping before you know where they belong. The point is that deciding later is a legitimate answer.

Shift+I or 0 opens it. Filter All / Unread / Snoozed / With note, search, and sort - the default is oldest first: "oldest-first is how a backlog actually clears, since the links you have been avoiding are at the bottom."

Every count follows the active filter, and "Mark all read" honestly renames itself to "Mark shown read" when the view is narrowed.

This is the part no other bookmark manager has, and the reason nextDash was built.

Three levels of checking

What it can detect

Checking a service you have to be signed in to - v1.4.0

A self-hosted service bookmarked at its web interface used to answer "not signed in" to an anonymous check, so the row read broken while the service was fine. Store the sign-in once under Config -> Data & backups -> Sources -> Health sign-ins and point any number of bookmarks at it. The secret stays out of your backups unless you ask for it, and is dropped at the boundary if the service redirects the check elsewhere - the check goes on anonymously rather than handing your credential to a third-party address.

Uptime that does not flatter itself

Uptime pools individual checks rather than averaging per-monitor percentages. Every percentage carries the number of checks behind it: "100% from three checks is a weaker claim than 100% from three hundred." Days you did not open the dashboard leave a gap rather than a straight line through them.

Getting told

A downtime alert fires after N consecutive failures (default 3) and again on recovery.

Working the list

• Ten links, two minutes - a corner card names what is waiting and runs "Work through" over the worst ten.
• The rot report - sums up what has gone or moved, readable grouped by site.
• Repair, not just diagnosis - follow redirects in one action after a domain move, or point a dead link at its last Web Archive capture.

The largest new feature in v1.4.0. A block on a page can now hold something other than links.

A widget sits among your categories, is dragged into place like one, and can be one or two columns wide. It shares the same ordering list as categories, so there is one answer to where anything sits on the page. Add, name and arrange them under Config -> Widgets, which grew out of a list it started in under Pages & tags and now has its own place in the rail under Data & backups.

Twenty built-in tiles, plus one you build yourself

Grouped in the catalog by the question each one answers.

Are the links still good?

What is arriving?

What needs tidying?

How is this machine doing? - v1.4.8

The only four that read something outside nextDash, and the only ones that need setting up - a mounted /proc, a named disk, or a read-only Docker socket, depending which you add.

What's happening around you? - v1.7.0 / v1.7.1

Custom

The escape hatch, for a service that is not in the list: point it at an address that answers with JSON, name the fields, and it draws them - with 28 self-hosted services already filled in, from Sonarr and Plex to Pi-hole, Proxmox and Home Assistant. Can use the same stored sign-in as a health check, so no key ever reaches your browser.

Every widget has its own settings - which page it counts, how many rows, what it is called, how wide. A tile that leaves rows out now says how many, so five of twelve no longer looks like five of five. A figure on a tile opens the rows behind it, and a tile redraws from fresh data the moment its settings change.

Everything else in the health view is diagnosis - it tells you a link is dead and offers whatever copy somebody else happened to take. For a page nobody else bookmarked, there usually is none.

Local copies are, by far, the largest single thing a backup can carry - Section 17 covers how that stays opt-in.

Three ways the dashboard reorganises itself around what you actually do, without you filing anything.

Today (your keyword sets), Recently opened, Most used, Stale, Recently added (off by default), Fresh (bookmarks whose site published something new), one collection per tag, and your own rules on category, tag, page, status, pinned, untagged, or days since last opened.

Fresh

Switch it on and nextDash reads the head of every page you have saved, notes any RSS or Atom feed advertised there, and polls what it found hourly. "Not a feed reader - no articles are stored, only how many entries are newer than your last visit, because otherwise this is a second product rather than a five-hundred-line feature."

Tags

Shift+T for a quick-tag popover, / for the word cloud, t to filter the grid to a bookmark's own tag.

Cards that say more - v1.4.0

A preview card now shows who published a page, who wrote it and when, alongside the title and image it already had. For video providers, the card includes a player you can start without leaving the dashboard.

This is a page you look at every day. nextDash ships 114 built-in theme families - 228 variants counting light and dark - and a colour editor with contrast warnings.

Config, and not overwhelming you with it

Nine sections - Overview, Pages & tags, Bookmarks, Appearance, Behavior, Data & backups, Statistics, Help and About - each deep-linkable, with an At a glance panel showing how many settings differ from default, an Only changed filter above every tab, and Ctrl/Cmd+Shift+K to find a setting by name or by its current value.

Two smaller habits landed in v1.4.0: panels fold shut now and remember which were open, and slow actions show progress - refreshing every link preview is one request per bookmark, and it used to just sit there looking hung.

Everything up to here sends a link in. Since v1.4.0 nextDash can also push out, and let something else ask it questions.

Outgoing webhooks

Config -> Data & backups -> Webhooks. Five events: a bookmark added, changed or removed, and a monitored bookmark going down or coming back. A receiver can subscribe to all of them or to a few.

POST /your-endpoint
content-type: application/json
webhook-id: msg_2b7f...
webhook-timestamp: 1756253400
webhook-signature: v1,K5s0...
{"type":"bookmark.added","timestamp":"2026-08-27T09:30:00Z","data":{...}}

Signed with the Standard Webhooks scheme, so a receiver that already verifies those needs no special case. The id and timestamp are signed rather than merely sent: the id is how a receiver recognises a redelivery it already acted on, the timestamp is how it refuses one replayed a day later. The key is shown once, at save time. A failed delivery is retried twice with a growing gap; a 4xx is not retried. Endpoints are checked at save time and again at delivery - a receiver that answers "go and look over there" is not followed.

An assistant that can search your bookmarks

One MCP endpoint at POST /mcp, JSON-RPC 2.0, four tools: search the collection, look one bookmark up, list the tags in use, add a bookmark. Off until you switch it on - "it answers questions about every bookmark in the install, which is not something to add to a default install quietly." Origin is checked on every request, and adding a bookmark through it goes through the same handler the dashboard itself posts to - duplicate checks, URL validation and outgoing webhooks all still apply.

Your bookmarks are a map of what you care about. That map should live on your own disk - and the way a project handles that question tells you most of what you need to know about it.

Three ways to run it safely

Two tokens, two jobs

Other safety details, several new in v1.4.0

• A stored sign-in stays on the service it was stored for. A watched host that redirected a health check elsewhere used to send the credential wherever it was told; dropped at the boundary now.
• A custom widget's address and key stay on the server. They used to come back to the browser with the rest of the page's layout.
• A webhook cannot be talked into delivering somewhere else. Checked at save time, checked again at delivery.
• SSRF defence at dial time for preview, ping, icon fetch and the health check-a-URL box, with IP pinning for ~2 minutes to close the DNS-rebinding window.
• The data directory is not browsable - /data/ publishes data/icons/ and an uploaded favicon or font, and nothing else.

Analytics, and why they are off

Opt-in, off until you turn them on. When off, the tracker script is not emitted into the page at all - never downloaded, no request leaves your machine. When on, no bookmark names, URLs or search queries are ever sent; every number is rounded into a band (500+, never 1274). DISABLE_TELEMETRY=true removes the choice from users entirely, server-wide.

There is no database. Your entire installation is a folder of JSON files you can read in a text editor, copy to a USB stick, or put in git.

data/
├── bookmarks-1.json    one file per page: the page, its categories, its bookmarks
├── settings.json       every setting, saved searches, collections, theme choice
├── colors.json         your custom themes
├── finders.json        your web search providers
├── inbox.json          captured links waiting for triage
├── trash.json          deleted bookmarks, kept 30 days
├── health-history.json uptime samples - 30 days raw, 90 days of daily rollups
├── health-trend.json   one point per day, 90 days
├── webhooks.json       endpoint URLs and signing keys, mode 0600 - v1.4.0
├── icons/              fetched and uploaded favicons, content-named
├── local-copies/       saved page snapshots - v1.4.0
└── auto-backups/       rotating ZIPs, 3 by default (1-50)

Everything that has to be decided before startup is an environment variable. Sources, widgets, webhooks and MCP all live entirely in the UI.

A recommended LAN or VPS block

environment:
  - PORT=8080
  - NEXTDASH_WRITE_TOKEN=change-me-to-a-long-random-string
  - NEXTDASH_CORS_ORIGINS=https://dash.example.com,chrome-extension://your-extension-id
  - NEXTDASH_ACTIVITY_LOG=mutate,status,security
  - NEXTDASH_ACTIVITY_LOG_PERSIST=1

A short list, because knowing where a tool stops is more useful than another page of features.

• Not multi-user. No accounts, no roles, no permissions. Authentication is somebody else's job.
• Not a cloud service. No sync server, no hosted tier, no account to lose access to.
• Not a feed reader. Fresh counts what is new; it does not store or show articles.
• Not a read-later app, even with local copies - a snapshot for when the original disappears, not a reading queue.
• Not a general automation platform. Webhooks and MCP tell other tools what changed and answer questions about your bookmarks - not a workflow engine.
• Not browsable data. The data directory serves icons and an uploaded font, and nothing else.
• Not precious about its own decisions. The Enter-to-open default was introduced in one release and reverted in the next, with the measurement that justified it printed in the changelog.

Roughly three days from installed to habitual.

1. Day one - get it populated

   Import your bookmarks (browser export, or a Source if one of the five fits), delete what you have not opened in two years, and put your ten most-used sites on page one with shortcuts.

2. Day two - set it as your home page

   Install it as an app on your phone, add the browser extension, and set your browser's address-bar keyword so a search is one keystroke away.

3. Day three - switch on health, and try a widget

   Set your most important bookmarks to Periodic, your self-hosted services to Monitor, and drop a Health or Uptime widget on your main page.