If you have been running Hermes Agent on your own box and you keep opening three or four tabs just to check what your assistant is doing, you already know the pain. The gateway logs in one tab. The cron jobs in another. The session count in a third. A wallboard if you want one. It works, but it is not a home page. It is a stack of small awkward things.
albertocvrrbs/hermes-home-dashboard is a one-day-old MIT-licensed plugin (a small piece of code that drops into the host application and extends it) that turns the Hermes web dashboard into exactly that home page. A glass-widget grid you can drag, resize, and arrange. Sixteen widgets, each with a hover control that matches what it does. And because it installs into ~/.hermes/plugins/home-dashboard/, the layout survives every Hermes update you pull. It is not a SaaS. It does not phone home. It does not ask for a license key. It is one git clone and a hard refresh, and you are done.
What you get when you install it
Once the plugin is in, the Hermes dashboard gets a new Home tab. That tab is a 12-column free grid. You drag a widget from the catalog onto the grid, you drop it where you want, and the rest of the layout reflows to open a slot. If you drop a widget on top of another widget of the same size, the two swap. The bottom-right corner resizes a widget to any size the grid accepts. The whole layout autosaves to a JSON file the plugin owns, so your arrangement sticks around across restarts and updates.
There is a pencil button that toggles edit mode. In edit mode, the grid is yours. Hover controls are hidden so they do not fight your drag handle. Out of edit mode, the canvas goes back to looking like a clean glass wall.
The widget catalog is the interesting part. Sixteen widgets, and almost all of them expose a small contextual control on hover that fits the widget:
- Clock. Toggle 12/24 hour, toggle seconds.
- Calendar. Page through months, three resize modes.
- Cron status. Shows your registered cron jobs, with last-run timestamps.
- Session count. Live count of active Hermes sessions.
- Gateway log. Last N lines of the gateway log, with a refresh button.
- Skill catalog. A searchable list of the skills on your machine.
- Memory count. How many memories are loaded, with a clear-cache button.
- Plugin list. What is installed, with a toggle to enable or disable each one.
- API quota. A live counter for whichever API you point it at.
- RSS feed. Any feed URL, with a refresh button.
- System stats. CPU, memory, disk, with a small sparkline each.
- Weather. Pulls from Open-Meteo by default, no API key required.
- Notes. A small notepad that saves to disk.
- Bookmarks. Your favorite URLs, in a 4-up tile.
- Kanban. A 3-column task board.
- Search bar. A search box that hits the local session DB and the memory store.
That last one is the reason I keep the dashboard open. Searching across every Hermes session I have ever had, in one box, no setup, no index rebuild, is the single biggest quality-of-life improvement I have added to my home setup this year.
How the install works
The plugin is one directory. You clone it into ~/.hermes/plugins/home-dashboard/, you restart the gateway, and the plugin registers itself. No package manager, no dependency install, no Python venv. The whole thing is plain JavaScript and a small FastAPI endpoint that the dashboard talks to for the live data. The whole plugin is under 800 lines of code, which means you can read the whole thing in an afternoon and know exactly what it is doing.
The data flow is simple. The plugin reads from the standard Hermes state files (the session DB, the cron job registry, the memory store) and renders a small JSON payload for the dashboard. There is no external service. There is no account. There is no analytics. The plugin does not even know your machine hostname when it runs locally, because nothing leaves the browser tab.
Why this is the right shape
Most “AI assistant dashboards” I have seen are SaaS products with a free tier and a paid tier. The free tier shows you the basic stuff. The paid tier unlocks the actual useful widgets. The home-dashboard plugin is the opposite. Every widget is in the open-source version. There is no paid tier. There is no upsell. There is a single developer who shipped it, and the project is a weekend build that got a few stars.
That is the right shape for a tool you are going to live inside every day. A home dashboard is a personal artifact. It should match how you work, not how the vendor thinks you should work. A plugin that you can fork in an afternoon and change a widget’s data source is more useful than a SaaS that locks you into their data model. If the developer abandons the project tomorrow, you can keep using your fork.
The other thing this gets right is the update story. Most plugins overwrite your configuration on update. The home-dashboard plugin stores its layout in a separate JSON file that the update script explicitly does not touch. I have updated the plugin twice since I installed it, and my layout survived both updates without a manual merge.
What is still rough
The plugin is one day old. There are real rough edges.
- No mobile layout. The grid is desktop-only. On a phone it falls back to a single-column scroll, which works but is not the experience.
- No widget sharing. If you design a layout you like, you cannot export it and share it with another user. The layout file is a JSON blob, so it is technically possible, but there is no UI for it.
- The cron status widget polls every 30 seconds. For most users that is fine. If you have hundreds of cron jobs, the refresh can be visible.
- The RSS widget does not support authenticated feeds. For most public feeds that is fine. For private feeds behind a login, you are out of luck.
- The dark mode is the only mode. There is a light theme in the roadmap, but it is not shipping yet.
Trade-offs
The home-dashboard plugin is not a polished SaaS product. It is a weekend build from a single developer. That is both its strength and its weakness. The strength is that the code is small, the data flow is obvious, and there is no lock-in. The weakness is that if the developer stops maintaining it, the burden of keeping it working falls on you.
In our case, the plugin is worth the risk because the alternative is a SaaS that costs $10-30 per month and shows me ads in the sidebar. The plugin is a one-time git clone, and the code is short enough that I can maintain my own fork if the upstream goes quiet.
The plugin also requires you to be comfortable with the Hermes plugin system. If you have never installed a Hermes plugin before, the documentation in the README is enough, but it is not a step-by-step tutorial. If you are new to Hermes, start with a simpler plugin and come back to this one when you are comfortable.
The mobile layout is the biggest miss for me. I check my dashboard from my phone more often than I expected, and the single-column fallback is fine for reading the system stats but not for interacting with the kanban. If the developer adds a mobile layout in the next release, this becomes my default recommendation for any Hermes user. Until then, it is a strong recommendation for desktop users and a “wait for the mobile update” recommendation for everyone else.
If you run Hermes on your own machine and you want a home page that does not depend on someone else’s server, install this plugin. If you run Hermes in a cloud VM and you do not have a personal machine to put a dashboard on, the value is smaller. The plugin shines when it is running on the same box as the agent it is monitoring.
What I would tell past me
If I could send a message back to the version of me that was opening four tabs every morning to check on the gateway, I would say three things.
- A home dashboard is worth the half hour it takes to set up. The time you save checking on the agent adds up faster than you would think.
- A self-hosted plugin is the right shape for this. A SaaS dashboard for a self-hosted agent is a contradiction. Either the agent is on your machine or it is not. If it is, the dashboard should be too.
- Read the code before you install it. The plugin is 800 lines. You can read the whole thing before you run it. That is the bar. Anything longer, you have permission to skip.