Build a dashboard
Build a live dashboard or internal tool on FlareX — wire in a Postgres database, refresh on a schedule, and add auth.
Updated
Looking for ready-made starting points? The dashboards category has working templates for KPI overviews, inventory monitors, and customer-success health boards.
Dashboards are one of the most-built system types on FlareX. The combination FlareX is good at:
- Pull data from somewhere (Postgres, an external API, both).
- Render it as charts or tables.
- Refresh on a schedule or in real time.
- Optional: gate access behind a simple login.
What FlareX picks for you
Default stack: Node + a server-rendered HTML page with Tailwind, plus Chart.js or a small SVG library for charts. The dashboard lives at one URL — your-app-abc123.flarex.app — and refreshes on a configurable cadence.
If you ask for "a real-time dashboard," FlareX uses Server-Sent Events (SSE) to push updates to the browser without polling.
The two database options
You have two ways to back your dashboard with data:
Prompt template
A dashboard showing our key metrics from <DATA_SOURCE>:
- <METRIC 1> (e.g., MRR over the last 90 days as a line chart)
- <METRIC 2> (e.g., signups today vs. yesterday as a callout card)
- <METRIC 3> (e.g., recent activity as a table, latest 20 rows)
Refresh every <INTERVAL> minutes.
<AUTH GATE> (e.g., gate behind a single password I set as DASHBOARD_PASSWORD).
Authentication
For dashboards intended for a small team, the simplest gate is a shared password:
Gate the dashboard behind a single password I'll set as DASHBOARD_PASSWORD.
Use a session cookie so I don't have to re-enter it on every load.
For richer auth (per-user accounts, role-based access), describe what you want and FlareX wires up GitHub or Google OAuth.
Refreshing the data
Three patterns, in order of cost and complexity:
| Pattern | Use when | Trade-off |
|---|---|---|
| Refresh on page load | Data is small + queries are fast | Slow first paint if the query is heavy |
| Cache + refresh on a schedule | Heavy queries, tolerable staleness (30s–5m) | Risk of showing stale data right after a change |
| SSE push | Genuinely real-time (live counts, ticker boards) | More moving parts; only worth it when you need it |
Tell FlareX which pattern you want and the trade-off.
Showing data from a 3rd-party API
If your dashboard pulls from Stripe / your CRM / GitHub / etc., that's an integration. The pattern is always:
- Add the API key to Secrets.
- FlareX writes a fetch wrapper with retry + cache.
- The dashboard renders from the cache.
See the Stripe walkthrough for a worked example.
Iterating
"Add a row of summary cards above the charts." "Switch the signups chart from line to bar." "Make the table sortable by clicking the column headers." "Drop the cache TTL from 5m to 1m."
What's next
- Databases — schema, scoped roles, the workspace-shared DB
- 3rd-party APIs — patterns for Stripe, GitHub, etc.
- OAuth — per-user login flows
- Build an API service — when you need an API behind your dashboard