glanceapp/glance

If you already run a home server and want one page showing your feeds plus the health of your services, Glance is worth a short trial. Treat the YAML layout as the real cost: it is the product.

The problem

You want to check news, a few YouTube channels, market prices and whether your containers are up without opening six tabs. The usual workaround is a browser start page plus bookmarks plus separate monitoring UIs. Glance replaces that with one served page whose widgets each fetch their source and cache the result. The result is a single, themeable grid you can open on desktop or phone instead of a scattered set of bookmarks.

What's different

Glance is a server-rendered dashboard configured entirely through YAML, with widget types for RSS, subreddits, Hacker News, weather, YouTube, Twitch, markets, Docker container status and server stats, plus custom options for iframe, static HTML, fetched HTML and a JSON-based custom-api widget. The interaction model is deliberately simple: pages are not polled in the background, data is fetched on page load and cached, and a refresh is required to update, according to the project's README FAQ. That suits an at-a-glance page and keeps the binary small, but it means Glance is not a live monitoring tool and not a full feed reader.

Customization is the main draw. Layouts and tabs are defined in config; themes ship separately and can be tweaked or replaced with custom CSS; community-built widgets are listed in a separate repository. The trade-off is that anything beyond the standard widgets requires editing YAML and, for custom-api, writing an HTML template, so setup is closer to configuration work than clicking through a settings screen.

Who should try it

A good fit is a homelab user who already runs Docker or a small Linux box, keeps services running and wants a personal landing page. The built-in container and server stats widgets add value precisely because the dashboard already lives alongside those services. A poor fit is someone expecting a hosted, zero-config start page, or someone who wants a complete RSS reader with read states and background sync: Glance fetches on page load and does not update itself, so heavy feed reading belongs elsewhere.

A 2024 Hacker News commenter noted the recurring difficulty of personal dashboards: personal data, calendars and account balances depend on third-party APIs that change, and each setup drifts as those APIs move (comment, 2024-05-15). That is a fair expectation-setting point rather than a defect in Glance: the more personal widgets you wire up, the more upkeep you inherit.

Requirements and limitations

You need a place to run it: Docker Compose is the recommended path, with a prepared directory template, or a binary per OS/architecture from the releases page. Linux binary users must arrange their own service management, for example a systemd unit. Configuration lives in config/glance.yml and per-page files, so you need to be comfortable with YAML and relative paths, and edits require a reload or restart to take effect.

Ongoing care matters more than first install. Each widget depends on its upstream source; if a feed URL, API or site layout changes, the widget shows nothing useful until you update its configuration. Page loads depend on the number of widgets and network speed, and the README gives roughly one second for uncached pages as an expectation, not a guarantee. The AGPL-3.0 license is relevant if you plan to modify and redistribute it.

HotRepo's take

On 2026-10-27, HotRepo recorded 37,772 stars and +70 for the day on the daily board, the only observation available. Across one tracked date, persistence cannot be judged. The 2024 thread drew 211 points and 35 comments, which shows discussion, not current momentum. Before adopting, check one concrete thing: whether every feed and API you intend to use still works with the documented widget configuration, since that is the part most likely to need your ongoing attention.