Self-Hosted Glance: One Page for Every Feed You Actually Read

Your browser opens to fourteen tabs: Hacker News, r/selfhosted, three RSS feeds, the weather, and a bookmark folder called "servers" you haven't reorganized since 2022. You wanted one page — the stuff you actually check before coffee, without an algorithm deciding what matters.

Glance is that page. ~35k GitHub stars, a single Go binary under 20 MB, and a self-hosted dashboard that aggregates feeds into a clean layout you control. RSS, Reddit, Hacker News, YouTube uploads, Twitch, weather, stock tickers, Docker container status, server stats, GitHub releases — one YAML file, one URL.

What it actually does

Glance is a start page and feed reader, not a full productivity suite. You define pages and columns in YAML; each column holds widgets. Three column sizes (small, full, small) give you a newspaper-style layout on desktop and a mobile-friendly view on your phone.

Built-in widgets. RSS feeds with caching, subreddit posts, Hacker News and Lobsters, YouTube channel videos, Twitch channels, weather forecasts, market prices, calendar, clock, bookmarks, GitHub release trackers, site monitors, Docker container status, server stats, DNS stats, ChangeDetection.io hooks, and more in the docs.

Custom widgets. Embed iframes, static HTML, fetch JSON via custom-api, or pull HTML from a URL with extension. Community widgets cover Steam specials, Plex stats, random cats — homelab culture at its finest.

Fast and tiny. Low RAM, minimal JavaScript, pages typically load in about a second depending on how many feeds you cram in. No Electron. No database. Config files on disk.

Themes. Tweak colors in YAML or pick from community themes. Custom CSS via user.css when you want the dashboard to match your homelab aesthetic.

Pages don't auto-refresh in the background — you reload when you want fresh data. Widgets cache responses (configurable per widget) so you're not hammering Reddit every thirty seconds.

Glance vs Uptime Kuma

We covered Uptime Kuma for alerting — it watches endpoints and pings you when things go red. Glance is the opposite energy: passive morning reading and at-a-glance status, not on-call notifications. Many homelabbers run both: Glance on the browser homepage, Uptime Kuma doing the actual monitoring with Slack alerts.

Why self-host a dashboard?

No algorithm, no account. Your feed list is a YAML file — not a social platform deciding what you see. Add selfh.st, drop a subreddit, remove the noise.

Homelab command centre. Docker container widget, server stats, site monitors, and bookmarks to your internal tools — Gitea, Immich, File Browser — on one page behind VPN or HTTPS.

Canadian hosting, trivial cost. Glance uses so little RAM it shares a VPS with your other self-hosted apps without complaint. Mount the config volume, done.

Privacy. Feed URLs and internal service links stay on your server. You're not logging into a third-party start page that tracks every click.

What running it takes

Docker is the easy path. Official image: glanceapp/glance on port 8080.

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

The Glance project provides a docker-compose template — run their one-liner to scaffold config/home.yml, config/glance.yml, and assets/user.css, then edit widgets to taste. Or download the example glance.yml from the repo and start minimal.

Sizing: if you can run Docker, you can run Glance. Plan a few hundred MB RAM. Disk is just YAML and optional CSS — negligible.

Put HTTPS in front if exposing beyond your LAN. If feeds time out, check Pi-hole or AdGuard DNS rate limits — Glance's docs call this out as the most common gotcha.

Dark Reader browser extension can break some widget layouts; disable it for your Glance domain if markets or bookmarks look wrong.

Back up the config/ directory — that's your entire dashboard definition.

Who it's for (and who should skip it)

Good fit: homelabbers who want a personalized start page, developers who live in RSS and HN, anyone tired of proprietary start.me-style dashboards, teams wanting a shared internal landing page with links and status widgets.

Maybe skip it: if you want a drag-and-drop GUI to build dashboards — Glance is YAML-first (Homarr or similar may feel friendlier). If you need real alerting and status pages for clients — that's Uptime Kuma, not Glance. If you won't edit YAML occasionally, a static HTML bookmark page is less moving parts.

Hosting it in Canada

We run Glance on Canadian Docker hosting alongside the rest of your stack — TLS, config backups, and reverse-proxy setup so your morning dashboard loads at https://home.yourdomain.ca instead of raw port 8080.

Tell us what widgets you want wired in — we'll deploy the container and hand you a working YAML template with your RSS feeds and internal bookmarks already slotted.