Deploy Glance in one click

What is Glance?

Glance is a self-hosted dashboard that puts what you read and check every day on one page: RSS feeds, subreddits, Hacker News and Lobsters, YouTube and Twitch channels, weather, market prices, a calendar, new releases of GitHub repositories and the status of your sites. People use it as a browser start page, in place of Netvibes or a feed reader such as Feedly, and on the phone, where the page fits the screen.

Everything is written in one YAML file: as many pages as you like, each in columns of widgets, with themes, custom CSS, and widgets of your own that read any JSON API. Glance is a single Go program of less than 20 MB, takes a few tens of megabytes of memory and loads a page in about a second.

This template runs Glance with its config in a volume, starting from a sample page, and with a sign-in by the username and password you give, so the dashboard is closed to strangers. The password goes into the config as a bcrypt hash, and failed sign-ins are counted by each visitor’s own address.

Hosting Glance on Pethost

1. You sign in to Pethost with a passkey, GitHub or Google. No machine yet? You pick a plan, and the link waits until it is ready.
2. New project opens at Glance. You fill in what it asks for and click Create project: Username, Admin password.
3. In a minute or two Glance is live at its own address with HTTPS. Its secrets are made at random, and its data is in the nightly backup.
4. It is a project like any other: you or your agent can change it, roll it back or restore it.

Questions about Glance

Glance Docker Compose file

The template is this compose.yaml and the variables written into the project’s .env as it is created. Pethost runs the file as it is written.

Containers: glance (glanceapp/glance:v0.8.7).

Volumes, in the nightly backup: config.

services:
  glance:
    image: glanceapp/glance:v0.8.7
    restart: unless-stopped
    environment:
      ADMIN_USERNAME: ${ADMIN_USERNAME}
      ADMIN_PASSWORD: ${ADMIN_PASSWORD}
    # The dashboard is /app/config/glance.yml, yours to edit: Glance reloads it when it is saved.
    # Its first start writes it from the one below and makes the key that signs sessions. Glance
    # puts ${VARIABLES} into the file as text before it reads it, so the password goes in as its
    # bcrypt hash, made at every start from the project's .env.
    entrypoint: ["/bin/sh", "-c"]
    command:
      - |
        set -e
        cd /app/config
        [ -f .secret-key ] || (umask 077 && /app/glance secret:make > .secret-key)
        [ -f glance.yml ] || cat /etc/glance/glance.yml > glance.yml
        GLANCE_SECRET_KEY="$$(cat .secret-key)"
        GLANCE_PASSWORD_HASH="$$(/app/glance password:hash "$$ADMIN_PASSWORD")" || {
          echo "$$GLANCE_PASSWORD_HASH" >&2
          exit 1
        }
        export GLANCE_SECRET_KEY GLANCE_PASSWORD_HASH
        unset ADMIN_PASSWORD
        exec /app/glance --config /app/config/glance.yml
    configs:
      - source: glance
        target: /etc/glance/glance.yml
    volumes:
      - config:/app/config

configs:
  glance:
    content: |
      server:
        # Requests come through the proxy: failed sign-ins are counted by the client's own address.
        proxied: true

      auth:
        secret-key: $${GLANCE_SECRET_KEY}
        users:
          "$${ADMIN_USERNAME}":
            password-hash: $${GLANCE_PASSWORD_HASH}

      pages:
        - name: Home
          columns:
            - size: small
              widgets:
                - type: calendar
                  first-day-of-week: monday

                - type: rss
                  limit: 10
                  collapse-after: 3
                  cache: 12h
                  feeds:
                    - url: https://selfh.st/rss/
                      title: selfh.st
                      limit: 4
                    - url: https://ciechanow.ski/atom.xml
                    - url: https://www.joshwcomeau.com/rss.xml
                      title: Josh Comeau
                    - url: https://samwho.dev/rss.xml
                    - url: https://ishadeed.com/feed.xml
                      title: Ahmad Shadeed

            - size: full
              widgets:
                - type: group
                  widgets:
                    - type: hacker-news
                    - type: lobsters

                - type: videos
                  channels:
                    - UCXuqSBlHAE6Xw-yeJA0Tunw # Linus Tech Tips
                    - UCR-DXc1voovS8nhAvccRZhg # Jeff Geerling
                    - UCsBjURrPoezykLs9EqgamOA # Fireship
                    - UCBJycsmduvYEL83R_U4JriQ # Marques Brownlee
                    - UCHnyfMqiRRG1u-2MsSQLbXA # Veritasium

                - type: group
                  widgets:
                    - type: reddit
                      subreddit: technology
                      show-thumbnails: true
                    - type: reddit
                      subreddit: selfhosted
                      show-thumbnails: true

            - size: small
              widgets:
                - type: weather
                  location: London, United Kingdom
                  units: metric
                  hour-format: 24h

                - type: markets
                  markets:
                    - symbol: SPY
                      name: S&P 500
                    - symbol: BTC-USD
                      name: Bitcoin
                    - symbol: NVDA
                      name: NVIDIA
                    - symbol: AAPL
                      name: Apple
                    - symbol: MSFT
                      name: Microsoft

                - type: releases
                  cache: 1d
                  repositories:
                    - glanceapp/glance
                    - go-gitea/gitea
                    - immich-app/immich
                    - syncthing/syncthing

volumes:
  config:

compose.yamlSee it on GitHub