Building a Homelab Dashboard in One File — The Design and Dilemmas of a Single-file SPA

Building a Homelab Dashboard in One File — The Design and Dilemmas of a Single-file SPA 2026-03-29 | techsfree-web When building a homelab dashboard, the first question is what stack to use. Go proper with React + Vite? Consider SSR with Next.js? Or… put everything in a single HTML file? We went with the last option. The result: index.html surpassed 1,100 lines. Why Single-file SPA? The reason is simple: deployment is a single cp command. Anyone who's run something in a "production" environment — even a home server — knows the panic when the build pipeline breaks. node_modules missing, unlocked dependencies, wrong paths… every time that happens, you think: "does this dashboard really need all that?" Run Flask as a backend, serve the HTML from /. Load Vue and Chart.js from a CDN. That's a fully functional SPA. The lightness of managing it with a single systemd service is ideal for a homelab running 24/7. Keeping 1,000+ Lines Maintainable The problem is scale. Every new feature bloats th