Carte Noir

A printed-menu theme for Homepage: one page, three columns, every service set as a line on a menu with a dotted leader to its status, and its figures underneath in small type. Dark paper, brass accents, the Spectral typeface, a dated masthead with a three-day weather outlook, and a closing line that tells you whether everything is up.

It is a full re-layout done in custom.css and custom.js, so it needs no fork of Homepage. There are no image files: the lamp-glow background is CSS, and the service icons come from Homepage's icon CDN.

The demo services with made-up figures. First shared in a Dashboard Wednesday thread on r/selfhosted.

How this was made

This theme was built with Claude, Anthropic's AI model (Claude Opus 5.5), working in Claude Code. I set the direction: I asked for new layouts, picked the printed-menu design from Claude's mockups, chose the variations, typeface and details, and tried each change on my own dashboard. Claude wrote the code: the CSS and JavaScript, the widget configuration, the demo services and mock data, and most of this README.

Fork it

I built this for my own dashboard and may not update it often, so please fork it and make it your own rather than waiting on changes here. Pull requests are welcome, but I can't promise a quick reply.

The demo widgets read their figures from demo/mock.json in this repository. If you change those figures in your fork, point the mock.json links in services.yaml at your fork.

What's here

File	What it does
custom.css	The whole theme
custom.js	Masthead (date and Open-Meteo weather), closing line, spelled-out durations, sizes in GB/TB
settings.yaml	Settings the theme relies on, and the group order that makes the columns
services.yaml	46 demonstration services across the nine sections. Runs as is with made-up figures; each widget's real configuration sits beside it as a comment
demo/mock.json	The made-up figures the demo widgets read
widgets.yaml	Empty on purpose: the masthead replaces Homepage's information widgets
bookmarks.yaml	Example "Elsewhere" bookmarks group

Built on Homepage v2.5.0 and checked in Chromium at desktop, tablet and phone widths. It uses CSS :has(), so it needs a browser from 2023 or later.

Install

1. Copy custom.css and custom.js into your Homepage config folder (the one mounted at /app/config). Empty your widgets.yaml too (or use the one here), or Homepage's resource and search widgets sit above the title.
2. Merge these into your settings.yaml. The theme expects them:

   theme: dark
   headerStyle: clean
   statusStyle: basic     # site monitors show as the words "up" / "down"
   disableCollapse: true  # group headings are not clickable

3. List every group in layout: in settings.yaml. That order fills the columns top to bottom, left to right. Bookmark groups can be mixed in.
4. Reload the page. Homepage picks up config changes without a restart.

Try the demo

Drop all five YAML files plus custom.css and custom.js into an empty config folder and the page fills with made-up figures straight away. The demo widgets read them from demo/mock.json in this repository over the internet, and every status check points at Homepage itself, so everything shows "up". To switch a service to the real thing, delete its demo widget, uncomment the "real widget" block under it, and point its siteMonitor at the service.

Make it yours

• Title: set --site-title near the top of custom.css.
• Weather: set LAT, LON, TZ and UNIT near the top of custom.js. Rounded coordinates are plenty; there is no need to publish your exact address.
• Column heads: on wide screens the theme starts a new column at the groups that contain the services named in the break-before: column rule (Jellyfin and OPNsense in the example). Change those two names to a service from the group you want at the top of the second and third columns.
• Per-service tweaks: a few rules near the middle of custom.css shorten or reorder labels for OPNsense, Mikrotik, Transmission and Pangolin so their figures fit on one line. They match services by name; rename or delete them to suit your own list.

Figures and units

Homepage formats each widget's figures its own way, so a page can end up mixing styles. custom.js tidies up the ones listed below. The list is not complete: other widgets may still show units in Homepage's own style, and you can extend rewriteValue() in custom.js to cover them.

What is converted today, in widget figures and in the TrueNAS pool rows:

Homepage shows	Carte shows	Rule
1mo16d, 3d 4h, 45m	1 month 16 days, 3 days 4 hours, 45 minutes	Short durations spelled out: years (y), months (mo), weeks (w), days (d), hours (h), minutes (m) and seconds (s), singular or plural as needed
38 GiB, 1.5 MiB	41 GB, 1.6 MB	Binary sizes (KiB, MiB, GiB, TiB, PiB) become decimal ones (kB, MB, GB, TB, PB), matching the sizes other widgets show
950 GiB	1 TB	A converted size of 1000 or more moves up to the next unit
13.4 TiB / 21 TiB	14.7 TB / 23 TB	Each side of a used / total pair is converted

A converted size keeps no more decimal places than Homepage gave it, so a whole 38 GiB becomes a whole 41 GB.

Left as Homepage sends them: transfer rates (4.2 MB/s), memory in Homepage's short form (512M), percentages, counts, and any temperature a widget reports. The weather in the masthead is fetched in the unit set by UNIT in custom.js (Fahrenheit or Celsius), so it needs no conversion.

Separately, custom.css shortens some labels by position (for example OPNsense's "wan upload" becomes "up"); see "Per-service tweaks" above.

Credentials

The demo services.yaml never holds a secret. Each one is a placeholder such as {{HOMEPAGE_VAR_IMMICH_KEY}}, which Homepage fills from an environment variable of the same name (HOMEPAGE_VAR_IMMICH_KEY=...) set on the container. Keep your real values in an .env file or your orchestrator's secrets, never in the repository.

A few of the real widget blocks take their credentials in a particular form:

• Proxmox and Proxmox Backup Server: an API token, with the token ID (user@pam!tokenname, or user@pbs!tokenname) as username and the token secret as password
• OPNsense: the API key as username and the API secret as password
• Pi-hole v6: an app password as key

The font

Carte is set in Spectral, weights 300, 400 and 600. There are three ways to load it; pick one.

1. From Google Fonts (the default, nothing to do)

The first line of custom.css fetches Spectral from Google Fonts whenever the page opens. The only catch is that each viewer's browser sends a request to Google.

2. From your own Homepage

Homepage serves anything in a folder mounted under /app/public, so it can host the font itself.

Download the three weights into a fonts folder beside your Homepage config. These come from Fontsource, under the same SIL Open Font License as Google's copy:

mkdir -p fonts && for w in 300 400 600; do curl -sLo fonts/spectral-$w.woff2 https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/@fontsource/spectral@5/files/spectral-latin-$w-normal.woff2; done

Mount the folder by adding this under volumes: in your Homepage compose file, then recreate the container:

      - ./fonts:/app/public/fonts:ro

In custom.css, delete the @import line at the top and put these in its place:

@font-face { font-family: 'Spectral'; font-weight: 300; font-display: swap; src: url('/fonts/spectral-300.woff2') format('woff2'); }
@font-face { font-family: 'Spectral'; font-weight: 400; font-display: swap; src: url('/fonts/spectral-400.woff2') format('woff2'); }
@font-face { font-family: 'Spectral'; font-weight: 600; font-display: swap; src: url('/fonts/spectral-600.woff2') format('woff2'); }

3. Embedded in custom.css

Nothing extra to host or mount, at the cost of about 90 KB added to the stylesheet. Download the files as in option 2, then run this in your config folder to append the three rules with the font data inside them:

for w in 300 400 600; do printf "@font-face { font-family: 'Spectral'; font-weight: %s; font-display: swap; src: url(data:font/woff2;base64,%s) format('woff2'); }\n" $w "$(base64 -w0 fonts/spectral-$w.woff2)"; done >> custom.css

Then delete the @import line at the top. On a Mac, use base64 -i instead of base64 -w0.

The downloaded files cover Latin characters only, which is all the theme displays; anything else falls back to the browser's serif font.

Credits

• Built with Claude (Claude Opus 5.5) by Anthropic, in Claude Code
• Homepage
• Spectral by Production Type, under the SIL Open Font License
• Weather data by Open-Meteo, under CC BY 4.0