Glance

Glance is a self-hosted dashboard for people who want a single page that pulls together RSS feeds, Reddit posts, Hacker News, weather, market prices, YouTube uploads, Twitch channels, Docker container status, and server stats. It's aimed at homelab users and self-hosters who want a fast, lightweight start page rather than a heavy monitoring stack or a hosted SaaS aggregator.

The whole thing is written in Go, ships as a single binary or Docker image, and is configured entirely through YAML files. There's no database, no background polling loop, and no account system, information is fetched when you load the page and then cached for a configurable duration.

Key features

• Widget variety: RSS feeds, subreddit posts, Hacker News, weather forecasts, YouTube channel uploads, Twitch channels, market prices, Docker container status, server stats, and custom widgets.
• Small footprint: a single binary under 20MB, low memory use, few dependencies, and minimal vanilla JS. Uncached pages typically load in about a second.
• Layout flexibility: multiple pages/tabs, configurable column layouts, and per-widget style options, all defined in YAML.
• Custom widgets: build your own using iframe, html, extension, or custom-api widget types to pull in HTML or JSON from any URL.
• Theming: pick from existing themes or tweak a handful of values to build your own, plus support for custom CSS.
• Mobile-friendly layout: the dashboard adapts to phone screens so it's usable away from your desk.
• On-demand refresh model: no periodic background requests; data loads and caches on page load, with cache lifetime configurable per widget.

Ideal use cases

Glance fits well as a homelab start page: a landing page that shows your Docker container health, weather, a few subreddits, RSS feeds from blogs you follow, and market tickers, all in one glance. It's also a reasonable fit if you want a lightweight alternative to bookmark folders or browser new-tab extensions, since it runs on your own server and doesn't send your reading habits anywhere else.

It's not built to be a real-time monitoring or alerting tool. Because widgets fetch data on page load rather than polling continuously, it won't notify you the instant something changes, you have to refresh the page (though a few widgets like the clock update dynamically without a reload). If you need live dashboards with push updates, alerting, or historical metrics storage, look at a dedicated monitoring stack instead. It's also not a replacement for a full RSS reader with read/unread tracking, sync across devices, or search, it's meant for quick glances rather than deep feed management.

Installation

The recommended path is Docker Compose using the provided template directory:

mkdir glance && cd glance && curl -sL https://github.com/glanceapp/docker-compose-template/archive/refs/heads/main.tar.gz | tar -xzf - --strip-components 2

Then edit docker-compose.yml for ports and volumes, config/home.yml for the home page widgets, and config/glance.yml for theme and additional pages. Start it with:

docker compose up -d

Alternatively, set up Docker Compose manually with a minimal docker-compose.yml:

services:
  glance:
    container_name: glance
    image: glanceapp/glance
    restart: unless-stopped
    volumes:
      - ./config:/app/config
    ports:
      - 8080:8080

Download a starting config with:

mkdir config && wget -O config/glance.yml https://raw.githubusercontent.com/glanceapp/glance/refs/heads/main/docs/glance.yml

Precompiled binaries are available for Linux, Windows, and macOS across x86, x86_64, ARM, and ARM64. On Linux, place the binary somewhere like /opt/glance/ and run it with an optional --config flag pointing to your YAML file. Glance is also packaged through Proxmox VE Helper Scripts, NixOS, Hostinger, and Coolify.io.

To build from source, you need Go 1.23 or later:

go build -o build/glance .

Or build the Docker image directly:

docker build -t owner/glance:latest .