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shopify/dashing

10,913JavaScriptAudience · developerComplexity · 3/5LicenseSetup · moderate

TLDR

Dashing is an archived Ruby framework for building status dashboards with a grid of visual widgets, originally created by Shopify and intended for display on office TV screens.

Mindmap

mindmap
  root((dashing))
    What it does
      Status dashboards
      Widget grid layout
      TV display
    Tech Stack
      Ruby Sinatra
      CoffeeScript
    Use Cases
      Office displays
      Ops monitoring
    Status
      Archived by Shopify
      Community fork exists
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Things people build with this

USE CASE 1

Build an office status board that shows real-time metrics on a TV screen

USE CASE 2

Display operational data from multiple sources in a grid of visual widgets

USE CASE 3

Set up a team dashboard that aggregates stats from APIs without writing a full web app

Tech stack

RubyCoffeeScriptJavaScriptSinatra

Getting it running

Difficulty · moderate Time to first run · 30min

Project is archived, use the community fork at dashing-io/dashing for active support and bug fixes.

Use freely for any purpose, including commercial use, as long as you keep the copyright notice.

In plain English

Dashing is a framework for building status dashboards, originally created by Shopify. It is built on top of Sinatra, a lightweight Ruby web framework, and lets developers put together visual dashboards that can display data from various sources in a grid of widgets. The README notes it looks especially great on TVs, suggesting its intended use as a display screen in an office or operations room rather than as an interactive web application. The project is no longer actively maintained by Shopify. A note in the README links to an issue explaining that decision, and points to a community fork at dashing-io/dashing for anyone who wants a version that is still receiving updates. The original repository remains available and many teams still run it, but new feature development and bug fixes are not happening here. The description mentions CoffeeScript as part of the stack alongside Ruby, which was a common combination for web projects when Dashing was at its peak. CoffeeScript is a language that compiles to JavaScript and was popular before modern JavaScript added many of the features that made it appealing. The project is distributed under the MIT license, which allows free use, modification, and redistribution with minimal restrictions. Given that the project is archived and the README is brief, teams evaluating it today would need to visit the community fork or the project homepage for documentation and widget examples. With nearly 11,000 GitHub stars accumulated over the years, Dashing was widely adopted during its active period and many organizations built internal dashboards with it.

Copy-paste prompts

Prompt 1
Using the Dashing framework with Sinatra and CoffeeScript, help me create a widget that pulls metrics from a REST API and displays them on a dashboard grid
Prompt 2
Write a Dashing dashboard layout that shows server uptime, response times, and error counts in a TV-friendly grid
Prompt 3
Help me migrate a Dashing dashboard to the community fork at dashing-io/dashing and update any deprecated widget syntax
Prompt 4
Create a CoffeeScript widget for Dashing that auto-refreshes every 30 seconds with live data from a JSON endpoint
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