Glance: a self-hosted feed and homelab dashboard

Glance is a self-hosted dashboard written in Go, distributed under the AGPL-3.0 license by the glanceapp project on GitHub. It has no separate marketing site; the README on its repository is the closest thing it has to a home page (source: github.com/glanceapp/glance, read 2026-10-24). The repository was created in April 2024, and by this read had 37,665 stars, 1,497 forks and 323 open issues, with its most recent push on 2026-10-20 (source: gh api, read 2026-10-24).

Where Dashy and Homepage are built around a grid of service shortcuts, Glance leans toward feeds first. Its own repository description reads "A self-hosted dashboard that puts all your feeds in one place" (github.com/glanceapp/glance, read 2026-10-24). RSS, Reddit, Hacker News and YouTube uploads sit in the same layout as Docker container status and server stats, so it suits someone who wants one page for both what is running on their server and what they would otherwise read in a separate feed reader. If the only goal is a grid of app-launch tiles with live status dots, a launcher-first tool like Dashy or Homepage is a closer match to that specific job.

The configuration docs list several dozen widget types, though the project does not put a single number on the total. Feed and content widgets include RSS, Videos (a YouTube channel feed), Hacker News, Lobsters, Reddit and a Bookmarks widget for static links. Homelab widgets include Docker Containers, Monitor (an uptime and response-time check for your own services), Server Stats, DNS Stats, and a Releases widget that watches a GitHub repository for new tags. A few widgets round out a personal dashboard rather than a homelab one: Weather, Clock, Calendar, Todo, and Markets for stock or crypto prices (source: github.com/glanceapp/glance/blob/main/docs/configuration.md, read 2026-10-24).

Layout runs on a YAML file with pages, columns and widgets, and a page can be split into as many columns and tabs as needed. Custom widgets are possible without writing Go: an iframe widget embeds another page, an html widget inserts static markup, and a custom-api widget fetches JSON from a URL and renders it with a template you write. Several built-in themes exist, and you can also drop in your own CSS. None of this updates in the background. A widget refreshes when the page loads or reloads, on a per-widget cache duration you set, not on a timer running behind the scenes (source: github.com/glanceapp/glance, README FAQ, read 2026-10-24).

The README's manual Docker Compose method gives this file:

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

(source: https://github.com/glanceapp/glance, read 2026-10-24). Alongside that file, the README has you download a starting configuration by running wget -O config/glance.yml https://raw.githubusercontent.com/glanceapp/glance/refs/heads/main/docs/glance.yml, then bring the container up with docker compose up -d. The same page documents a second route with a ready-made template repository, pulled with a single curl and tar command, plus manual binary installs for Linux, Windows and macOS and a go build route for building it from source. Docker Hub lists the image across three architectures: linux/amd64, linux/arm64 and linux/arm/v7 (source: hub.docker.com/r/glanceapp/glance/tags, read 2026-10-24).

Glance is free. It is AGPL-3.0 licensed with no paid tier, hosted offering or license key anywhere in the repository or its docs, checked 2026-10-24. As with any self-hosted tool, the real cost is wherever you choose to run it, not the software itself.

• Every widget is populated when the page loads or reloads. There is no background polling, so a dashboard left open on a monitor will not refresh its feeds or stats on its own (source: github.com/glanceapp/glance, README FAQ, read 2026-10-24).
• The RSS, Reddit and Hacker News widgets are the project's main draw, but the Docker Containers, Server Stats and DNS Stats widgets only pay off if Glance is already sitting on the same machine or network as what they read.
• Its AGPL-3.0 license is stricter than the MIT or Apache licenses several of its closest alternatives use. A modified version run as a network service has to make its source available to users of that service, a condition MIT and Apache do not carry.
• Pi-hole and other DNS-based ad blockers can rate-limit a page running several widgets at once, which the README names directly as the most common cause of requests timing out (source: github.com/glanceapp/glance, "Common issues", read 2026-10-24).