Dashy Reorg — AI Prompts & Context

AI Prompts & Context — Dashy Reorganization

What Context Claude Needed

1. The live conf.yml URL — Dashy serves its config publicly at /conf.yml. Claude
   accessed this via curl http://10.10.15.11:8080/conf.yml. No credentials needed.
2. SSH access to Dock of the Bay — root@10.10.15.1. This was already in the user’s
   SSH config / known hosts, so no password prompt was needed for ssh or scp.
3. The unifi-kea-dashboard URL — this was in Claude’s memory files from a prior session
   (project_unifi_kea_dashboard.md). The port (5000) was not in memory and had to be
   supplied by the user mid-session. Always check memory but expect to confirm ports.
4. The appdata path — Claude found this by SSHing in and running:
   bash
find /mnt/user/appdata -name 'conf.yml'
   Result: /mnt/user/appdata/dashy/conf.yml. Standard unRAID path — safe to assume this
   for future Dashy work.

What Worked

Fetching the config with curl (not WebFetch):

curl -s http://10.10.15.11:8080/conf.yml

This returns the raw YAML in full. Use the internal IP to avoid any proxy/auth layers.

Backup before overwrite — always:

ssh root@10.10.15.1 "cp /mnt/user/appdata/dashy/conf.yml /mnt/user/appdata/dashy/conf.yml.bak.$(date +%Y%m%d_%H%M%S)"

SCP deploy pattern:

scp "/Users/kcossabo/Documents/Coding/Container Managment/dashy-conf.yml" \
    root@10.10.15.1:/mnt/user/appdata/dashy/conf.yml

Dashy hot-reloads the config — no container restart needed.

What Claude Got Wrong First

WebFetch couldn’t return the raw YAML. The first attempt used WebFetch against
http://home.cossaboon.net/conf.yml. WebFetch summarized the content instead of returning
it verbatim (content reproduction policy). The fix was to use Bash + curl against the
internal IP, which returns the raw bytes without interpretation.

Lesson: For config file audits, always use curl via Bash. WebFetch is for extracting
information from HTML pages, not for retrieving raw structured files.

Prompt Pattern That Worked

Starting prompt: “Review the configuration, organize it, and add anything that is missing.”

This gave Claude enough latitude to:
– Identify all issues (duplicates, typos, wrong icons, misplaced items)
– Propose a full restructure without being too prescriptive
– Ask for missing info (the Kea dashboard port) before writing the file

What to Watch For Next Time

Icon URLs — All icons use https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/gh/homarr-labs/dashboard-icons/.
Check https://dashboardicons.com before inventing an icon path — the filename is usually the
service name lowercased (e.g., synology.png, gitea.png, audiobookshelf.png). Some
services use -light or -dark variants. If unsure, fall back to FontAwesome (fas fa-*).

cols value is cosmetic — The cols field in displayData only affects layout when
the section is expanded. It does not control how many items appear; all items always show.
Set it to roughly match the number of items for a clean grid.

Dashy hot-reloads — Config changes go live within a few seconds of the file being
written. No restart needed unless the container itself crashes.

Auth is disabled — enableGuestAccess: false with an empty users array means anyone
on the network can access the dashboard. It’s not behind Authelia. Don’t put secrets in
item descriptions.

ropieee-logo.png — This is a local icon file served from inside the Dashy container’s
icons directory. If it ever stops showing, check /mnt/user/appdata/dashy/icons/ on
Dock of the Bay.

TailScale IPs (100.x.x.x) — NAS 4 is only reachable via TailScale. Items pointing to
100.99.126.120 will time out when not on TailScale. The description: TailScale required
note is intentional — don’t remove it.

IDs must be unique — Dashy uses the id field to track items. When writing new config,
generate unique IDs. The original format was {index}_{hash}_{slug}. The reorg switched to
a readable format: {index}_{section-prefix}_{slug} (e.g., 3_arr_prowlarr). Either
format works — just keep them unique across the whole file.