SELF-HOSTING

Glance – Self-Hosted Feeds Dashboard

Organize all of your feeds and more using the self-hosted Glance dashboard.

18/08/2024346 views0

Self-hosted dashboards have become popular, allowing people to collect and visualize important information. By hosting a dashboard on your own server or cloud storage, you can customize the layout and content to fit your needs, ensuring that the data most relevant to you is always accessible. Meet the latest addition to the self-hosted dashboard family, Glance.

What is Glance?

Glance is a dashboard tool that allows you to aggregate your favorite feeds in one place. You have complete control over the content and can easily monitor multiple sources of information without being tied to a specific platform or service. By self-hosting Glance, you can create a personalized feed reader that’s tailored to your interests and needs, allowing you to focus on the information and updates that are most important to you.

Glance Features and Widgets

RSS feeds
Subreddit posts
Weather
Bookmarks
Hacker News
Lobsters
Latest YouTube videos from specific channels
Clock
Calendar
Stocks
iframe
Twitch channels & top games
GitHub releases
Repository overview
Site monitor
Search box

Glance offers instant access to your favorite online sources, including blogs and websites via RSS feeds, subreddits, stocks, YouTube videos, GitHub repos, Twitch streams, custom links, app monitoring and more. You can customize your feed by adding or removing sources as you see fit, ensuring that the information you need is always at your fingertips. Also, Glance allows you to incorporate widgets for displaying current time, calendar, and weather updates providing a detailed and organized dashboard that suits your individual needs and preferences.

Install Glance Dashboard using Docker

This Docker Compose stack can be used to install Glance on your server.

services:
  glance:
    image: glanceapp/glance
    volumes:
      - /glance/glance.yml:/app/glance.yml
      - /etc/timezone:/etc/timezone:ro
      - /etc/localtime:/etc/localtime:ro
    ports:
      - 8080:8080
    restart: unless-stopped

Before getting started with Docker, first create a config file for your Glance setup by creating a new glance.yml file in the /glance directory. Copy the provided Glance template into this file and save it. Once complete, you can proceed to run the Docker Compose stack to install Glance.

Glance Themes

Customize Glance’s appearance by choosing from a variety of Glance theme colors. There are a selection of examples to get you started, and you can also create your own custom color scheme.

Simply add the theme snippet to the beginning of your config file

theme:
  background-color: 225 14 15
  primary-color: 157 47 65
  contrast-multiplier: 1.1

I highly recommend that you start with the preconfigured template to get familiar with Glance’s layout and formatting options. The Glance configuration documentation is also extremely helpful, providing detailed explanations of each widget’s functionality and different styles you can use. As you become more comfortable, you can use this knowledge to create your own custom design, tailored to your specific needs and preferences like I did. This is my community public edition of Glance.

Here is the glance.yml for for the above example.

theme:
  background-color: 225 14 15
  primary-color: 157 47 65
  contrast-multiplier: 1.1
pages:
  - name: Home
    columns:
      - size: small
        widgets:
          - type: clock
          
          - type: rss
            title: ROM / FIRMWARE / BYPASS
            limit: 10
            style: vertical-list
            collapse-after: 5
            cache: 1h
            feeds:
              - url: https://addrom.com/category/rom/feed
                title: addROM
              - url: https://addrom.com/category/bypass-frp/feed
                title: addROM Bypass

          - type: rss
            title: macOS
            limit: 10
            style: vertical-list
            collapse-after: 5
            cache: 1h
            feeds:
              - url: https://addrom.com/category/apple/macos/feed
                title: addROM
              
            columns:
             - size: full
      
      - size: full
        widgets:
          - type: rss
            title: Tips & Guides
            limit: 10
            style: detailed-list
            collapse-after: 4
            cache: 1h
            feeds:
              - url: https://addrom.com/category/tuts/feed
                title: addROM
              - url: https://9to5mac.com/guides/how-to/feed
                title: 9to5mac
              - url: https://www.theverge.com/rss/how-to/index.xml
                title: The Verge
              - url: https://www.makeuseof.com/feed/category/pc-mobile
                title: Make Use Of
              - url: https://www.androidauthority.com/guides/feed
                title: Android Authority
              - url: https://www.techradar.com/feeds/articletype/how-to
                title: TechRadar

          - type: rss
            title: Tech News
            limit: 10
            style: detailed-list
            collapse-after: 4
            cache: 1h
            feeds:
              - url: https://www.theverge.com/rss/tech/index.xml
                title: The Verge
              - url: https://www.sammobile.com/feed
                title: Sammobile
              - url: https://www.tomsguide.com/feeds/all
                title: Toms Guide             
              - url: https://www.howtogeek.com/feed/category/mobile/
                title: How To Geek
              - url: https://www.zdnet.com/topic/smartphones/rss.xml
                title: ZDNET
                
            columns:
             - size: full

      - size: full
        widgets:
          - type: videos
            size: full
            style: grid-cards
            limit: 15
            title: Self-Hosting and Homelab Youtube Channels
            channels:
              - UCwFpzG5MK5Shg_ncAhrgr9g # Awesome Open-Source
              - UCR-DXc1voovS8nhAvccRZhg # Jeff Geerling
              - UCv6J_jJa8GJqFwQNgNrMuww # ServeTheHome
              - UCOk-gHyjcWZNj3Br4oxwh0A # Techno Tim
              - UCXJ4jKAvMMg56WGhqrZHFgw # Techdox
              - UCVy16RS5eEDh8anP8j94G2A # DBTech
              - UCUUTdohVElFLSP4NBnlPEwA # Jims Garage
              - UC4iWyxtq_qq79Fo7crc34KQ # Easy Self Host
              - UCjSEJkpGbcZhvo0lr-44X_w # TechHut
              

  - name: Tech News
    columns:
      - size: small
        widgets:
          - type: calendar

          - type: releases
            repositories:
              - apache/incubator-answer
              - knadh/listmonk
              - xhofe/alist
              - n8n-io/n8n
              - inovector/mixpost
              - baptisteArno/typebot.io

          - type: rss
            title: Bypass FRP
            limit: 10
            style: vertical-list
            collapse-after: 5
            cache: 1h
            feeds:
              - url: https://addrom.com/category/bypass-frp/feed
                title: addROM Bypass
              
            columns:
             - size: full
      
      - size: full
        widgets:
          - type: hacker-news
            limit: 10
            collapse-after: 5
            style: vertical-list

          - type: rss
            title: General Tech
            limit: 10
            style: detailed-list
            collapse-after: 5
            cache: 1h
            feeds:
              - url: https://news.itsfoss.com/latest/rss
                title: It's FOSS
              - url: https://arstechnica.com/feed
                title: Ars Technica
                
            columns:
             - size: full

      - size: full
        widgets:
          - type: rss
            size: full
            style: vertical-list
            limit: 20
            collapse-after: 20
            title: Security
            cache: 1h
            feeds:
              - url: https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/feed/
                title: Bleeping Computer

Final Noted and Thoughts

To be honest, when I first installed Glance, I had a tough time customizing it. The template gives a great starting point, but I found myself repeatedly breaking and rebuilding my feed to get everything just the way I wanted. It was actually quite time consuming and I spent several hours getting things set up to my liking. Be prepared to spend time fine-tuning your Glance setup to achieve the exact level of customization that suits your unique needs and preferences.

See more about Glance on the Glance Github repo. Don’t forget to show your appreciation by giving the project a star!