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Setting up Netdata and Fixing its Favicon

Installation

Install Netdata with apt, you will get an older version if you are on Debian and if you are using their official package but it’s not a big deal.

1apt install netdata

Then start the service with systemd

1systemctl enable --now netdata.service
2systemctl status netdata.service

That’s it actually, Netdata is now listening on it’s default port 19999 and you can try to access it with the IP of your NAS or VPS or whatever if the port is open.

Should you need to edit it’s settings, the config is at /etc/netdata/netdata.conf.

Securing it with a reverse proxy

Using Caddy for this tutorial because I love it, open the Caddyfile and add these lines:

1yourdomain.tld {
2    basicauth * {
3        diowo <your hash>
4    }
5    reverse_proxy localhost:19999
6    encode gzip
7}

Now generate a hash with caddy hash-password and replace <your hash>. We do this because Netdata doesn’t provide anyway to secure it using HTML forms. Also one neat thing browsers can do with this (basic auth) is that you could login using something like https://user:[email protected].

Fixing the favicon

Installing Netdata on Debian is very easy as you can see but it has a similar problem to Syncthing where the favicon will not load on Firefox, and the reason is very weird: Netdata v1.37.1 (the one in the official Debian repository) embeds the favicon as base64 in the HTML, and Firefox can’t load it in the bookmarks which is incredibly annoying.

To fix this you will probably want to download the favicon at https://netdata.cloud because the one from Netdata that you download is a bright, ugly green.

1cd /usr/share/netdata/web/
2wget https://www.netdata.cloud/favicon-32x32.png

Now edit the index.html file: /usr/share/netdata/web/index.html (on vim search for rel="icon" or something to find)

1<!-- ... --><link rel="icon" href="/favicon-32x32.png"/><!-- ... -->

Now that should be it, you don’t even need to restart, just go on Firefox and hard refresh the page with Ctrl + F5.

Thanks for reading, I hope that helps someone.

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Created on: Friday, 1 March 2024