While there are plenty of self-hosted dashboards you can try, they each have their strengths and weaknesses. While Glance initially intimidated me due to its configuration requirements, the process of setting up my own page went much smoother than expected.

Now I can view snapshots of important news, as well as other feeds I like to follow, from a single, customizable page.

What is Glance?

A dashboard with impressive customization

Glance is a self-hosted dashboard that feels endlessly customizable. While it's aimed at providing you with a comprehensive view of your favorite feeds, its wide range of widgets allows you to add even more information to your dashboard.

This includes RSS feeds, subreddits, Hacker News, and Lobster posts, video feeds for services like YouTube and Twitch, market indices, server, and container stats, weather information, and more. It also supports plenty of community widgets that cover everything from specials on Steam to media server stats.

If you have coding experience, you can also create your own custom widgets to add to your template.

How to easily deploy Glance

Template files make everything simpler

While I've deployed self-hosted dashboards like Homarr in the past, I was intimidated by Glance due to the way you customize your dashboard. Rather than using a graphical interface or settings within the app, you set up your widgets, themes, and appearance using YAML files.

However, when I set aside the time to set up Glance, the process was easier than expected. Because I use Docker Desktop on Windows, I can't simply set up the container using the same commands as the app's documentation suggests.

To deploy Glance, I first created a folder for my files. I then downloaded and saved the example docker-compose.yml provided in the documentation.

I then created a config and assets folder. While these folders would be created when I ran my Docker Compose commands, I needed to add additional YAML files to the config folder, so I created it preemptively. In this folder, I saved the example home.yml and glance.yml files.

Since I wanted to use a different theme as the default, I added the code for the Neon Pink theme to glance.yml file. You can find the different options available on the Glance themes page, but you can also adjust the parameters to create your own theme.

I then edited the home.yml to include the widgets and feeds I wanted. At first, I simply removed the feeds I didn't want to use from the pre-configured options to test that the container would still start up correctly. I then started adding additional widgets, including community widgets, to tailor the page to my own preferences.

I recommend using an editor like VS Code so that you can spot any indentation errors that might interfere with deployment. This helped me immensely when trying to figure out why Docker was encountering issues with the syntax.

In the end, I could set up widgets for a calendar, RSS feeds, weather, Steam specials, YouTube videos, free games on Epic Games, posts from certain subreddits, and a random cat picture generator.

Some things to keep in mind

It has both strengths and drawbacks

Glance is much easier to set up when you use one of the pre-configured templates and edit the fields and widgets you want to add. This helps you get a feel for how the app's appearance responds and how you need to structure things. For example, in the RSS widget's field, I changed the URLs and titles for the feeds, and adjusted how many items it displayed. I also moved this feed to the top of the column to make it easier to view.

You don't even have to use the configuration included in the example files; you can choose one from the pre-configured pages section on GitHub.

It is important to note, though, that because you need to edit various fields or insert them from scratch, it can be time-consuming to configure the pages compared to some other dashboard solutions. However, even though I don't have coding experience, I could get my customized page up and running in under two hours, even though the only thing I really kept the same was the calendar widget.

You would need more time, though, if you plan to add extensive widgets or want to create a page from scratch. However, the experience is rewarding, especially because of how customizable your page can be.

Your dashboard is also mobile-responsive, which means it's easy to use on your phone. As a result, I'm considering moving my dashboard to my NAS so that I can access it around the clock.

However, I'd also caution against including any sensitive information or feeds on your dashboard. You can add authentication to your configuration, but this option is not there by default.

Glance reminds me of the fun of self-hosting

While I encounter my fair share of challenges while self-hosting without coding experience, Glance reminded me of how fun it feels when you get something working. Editing the pre-configured template reminded me of the days I spent as a preteen changing the HTML on pages to get a website looking the way I wanted it to.

However, it's thanks to the community and developers that these templates are available so that others can work with them to customize everything to their personal needs. And this customization is what makes Glance so powerful.