Glance

What is Glance?

Glance is a self-hosted dashboard that puts your feeds, bookmarks, RSS, weather, calendar and server stats on one page. It is configured with a single YAML file and designed to be a fast start page for a home lab or personal server.

Best for

Home lab users who want one start page for everything

Why choose Glance

Glance is for the person who opens the same eight tabs every morning. It puts the feeds you actually read — RSS, Hacker News, Reddit, YouTube channels, release notes, market data, server stats — onto one fast page that loads in a blink. It is configured with a single YAML file rather than a web interface, which sounds austere until you realise it means your dashboard is versionable, portable and easy to back up. One small binary serves the whole thing.

Replaces

• Homer
• Dashy
• Heimdall

Key features

• RSS, Reddit, Hacker News widgets
• Server and container monitoring widgets
• Single YAML configuration
• Very lightweight

What to watch out for

YAML-only configuration is a deliberate trade, and it is not for everyone: there is no drag-and-drop, no live preview of most widgets, and a syntax error means a blank page rather than a helpful message. Widget coverage, while broad, is not universal — anything without a built-in widget needs a custom API-backed entry, which assumes you can read a JSON response. Because it is designed to be exposed for personal use, you are responsible for putting authentication in front of it; it does not ship with user accounts.

How to deploy

• Docker
• Binary

Getting started

Start from the project's example configuration rather than a blank file, and comment out everything you have not configured yet so you can bring widgets up one at a time. Run it in Docker with the config file mounted read-only, so an accidental edit inside the container cannot be lost. Pick the page's location deliberately — it is often easiest to make it an internal-only dashboard behind your reverse proxy, or to serve it only on your home network. Attach bookmarks to services you expose rather than to the admin pages themselves, and add the status widgets last, since they need API keys.

Typical setup

The intended setup is a small container next to everything else it monitors, reached either only on the home network or through a reverse proxy with authentication. Because configuration is one YAML file, people keep theirs in a Git repository and version it alongside their other infrastructure configuration. It frequently replaces a browser's bookmark bar and a folder of service URLs, and it is often the page a self-hoster sets as their browser's home screen.

Who should look elsewhere

Not for anyone who wants to configure a dashboard by clicking. It is YAML or nothing, with no live preview and unhelpful errors when the file is malformed. It is also the wrong tool if your dashboard must be public or multi-user — it has no concept of accounts, so anything it shows is shown to everyone who can reach it.

Project health

• GitHub stars: 37,281
• Last code push: 2026-09-05
• Open issues: 322
• Status: actively developed

Figures pulled from the GitHub API and refreshed periodically.