Is my Glance dashboard publicly visible?

No — Glance is configured with built-in authentication. Any visitor is redirected to a login page and must enter the admin username and password. You can add more users in the config file's auth.users section. For extra isolation, place Glance behind a VPN or Cloudflare Access.

Yes. Glance is AGPL-3.0 open-source software — free to use, modify and self-host. There are no paid plans, no feature paywalls and no usage limits. You only pay for the ServOrbit VPS that runs it.

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Glance

Self-hosted startpage dashboard — tech news, server metrics and container status on one page, stateless, under 25 MB RAM.

512 MB RAM 1 vCPU Port 8080 Available

Tech stack

DockerGo

Minimum RAM512 MB

Minimum CPU1 vCPU

Default port8080

Compatible OSChoice of Linux distributions

Glance (AGPL-3.0, 35.8 k+ stars) is a self-hosted dashboard that puts your most-used information feeds and server stats on a single, fast-loading page. Written in Go, it idles under 25 MB of RAM, serves from a single config file and starts in under a second — without a database, without Redis, without complex setup.

Deployed on a ServOrbit VPS, Glance gives you a personal startpage featuring Hacker News stories, RSS feeds, GitHub release timelines, server CPU/RAM/disk stats and Docker container status — all consolidated into a configurable columnar layout. Adding a widget is a single block in a YAML config file.

The auth module secures the dashboard with per-user username/password logins and a signed-session secret key, so your VPS stats and private feeds stay behind a login form — no additional reverse-proxy auth layer required. With 30+ first-party widget types covering news aggregators, developer tools, finance tickers, weather, clocks and custom REST API widgets, Glance scales from a simple homelab startpage to a full team operations dashboard.

Key features

30+ first-party widgets — Hacker News, RSS, Reddit, YouTube, GitHub releases, weather, clock, stocks, search, Docker container status, server stats and more.

Under 25 MB RAM — single Go binary, no database, no Redis; runs alongside any existing service on your VPS without adding overhead.

Built-in auth — username/password login with a signed session secret key; configure multiple users in the YAML config.

Single YAML config — add a widget in two lines; update the file and restart the container.

Docker container status widget — see all running containers and their status at a glance (requires /var/run/docker.sock:ro).

Server stats widget — live CPU, RAM, disk and network metrics for your VPS, updated every few seconds.

Multiple pages and column layouts — wide, full-width, two-column and more; group widgets logically per page.

AGPL-3.0 licence — no telemetry, no cloud account, no per-user fee.

When to use this solution?

VPS operations dashboard

Mount Glance on your primary VPS and configure it with server-stats and docker-containers widgets. You get a live view of CPU, RAM, disk and the status of every Docker stack running on the server — without SSH-ing into the machine or opening a separate monitoring tool. Pair it with Hacker News or a custom RSS feed widget to make Glance your browser default tab.

Developer homelab startpage

Replace your browser's new-tab page with Glance: add a GitHub releases widget tracking your favourite projects, a Hacker News widget for tech news, a search bar and bookmarks to your local services. Everything loads from one lightweight container in under a second. The YAML config makes it trivial to add or remove widgets as your homelab grows.

Shared team status board

Host Glance on a shared ServOrbit VPS and point a subdomain at it. Configure widgets for your team's key feeds — deployment status via GitHub releases, server stats, uptime data and a Hacker News digest. Every team member opens the same URL and sees the same up-to-date status board without any additional infrastructure.

Deploy Glance on your VPS

Guide optimized for ServOrbit Cloud VPS.

Order a ServOrbit VPS

Any plan from 512 MB RAM upward works. Glance's Go binary idles under 25 MB RAM with all widgets active. Ubuntu 24.04 is recommended. You can run Glance on the same VPS as other services without adding meaningful overhead.

Deploy Glance from the ServOrbit marketplace

Open your ServOrbit control panel, go to Marketplace → Monitoring & Observability → Glance, and click Deploy. The provisioning playbook pulls glanceapp/glance:latest, generates a default glance.yml with Hacker News and server-stats widgets and your admin credentials, and starts the container on port 8080. The dashboard is ready in seconds.

Log in with your admin credentials

If you attached a domain to the VPS, open https://your-domain — ServOrbit puts an nginx vhost with TLS in front of Glance, so the address carries no port number. Without a domain the dashboard is published on the VPS loopback only: open an SSH tunnel from your machine — ssh -L 8080:127.0.0.1:8080 root@your-vps-ip, using the port shown on your app's page in the ServOrbit dashboard (8080 by default) — then browse to http://localhost:8080. Either way you land on the Glance login page. Enter the username admin and the password shown in your ServOrbit control panel. Once logged in, you see the default Home page with a Hacker News feed and live VPS server stats.

Customise your dashboard

SSH into your VPS and edit /data/glance.yml (stored in the named Docker volume). Add widget blocks to the columns section — for example, - type: rss with a feeds list, or - type: docker-containers to see all running containers. Save the file and run docker compose restart glance. New widgets appear immediately.

Add a custom domain (optional)

Attach a subdomain like dash.your-domain.com to the app from your ServOrbit dashboard. ServOrbit creates the DNS record when the domain is managed there, installs an nginx vhost with a TLS certificate and proxies it to the app port — no reverse proxy to install, no Caddyfile to write. Port 8080 stays bound to 127.0.0.1 and is never published, so Glance answers over HTTPS at https://dash.your-domain.com only.

Frequently asked questions

Glance (AGPL-3.0, 35.8 k+ stars) is a self-hosted, single-page dashboard written in Go. It consolidates tech news (Hacker News, RSS, Reddit), server metrics, Docker container status, GitHub release timelines, weather and more into a configurable YAML-driven layout. It runs as a single Docker container with no database, idles under 25 MB RAM and starts in under a second.

It depends on how you want to open it. Glance publishes its port on the VPS loopback only, so there is no access over a plain IP and port: without a domain you open an SSH tunnel — ssh -L 8080:127.0.0.1:8080 root@your-vps-ip — and browse to http://localhost:8080, using the port shown on your app's page in the ServOrbit dashboard. That works well for a personal dashboard you open from your own machine. Attach a domain and ServOrbit puts an nginx vhost with TLS in front of Glance, so it answers at https://your-domain from any browser — what you want to reach it from a phone or to share it with your team.

Edit the glance.yml config file on your VPS (at /data/glance.yml inside the Docker volume). Each widget is a YAML block under a column. For example, add - type: rss with a feeds list to show RSS articles, or - type: docker-containers to monitor your containers. Restart with docker compose restart glance. Glance's documentation lists 30+ widget types.

Yes. Add - type: docker-containers to a column in glance.yml. The ServOrbit provisioning template mounts the Docker socket (/var/run/docker.sock) read-only inside the Glance container, so the widget reads your container list without elevated privileges. You will see each container's name, image and running status.

Embed the deploy button

Maintaining a project that uses Glance? This button lets your readers deploy it on a VPS in one click, without reading Docker documentation.

Markdown

[![Deploy Glance on ServOrbit](https://servorbit.com/brand/deploy/button.svg)](https://servorbit.com/vps-cloud?template=glance&utm_source=deploy-badge&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=glance)

HTML

<a href="https://servorbit.com/vps-cloud?template=glance&utm_source=deploy-badge&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=glance"><img src="https://servorbit.com/brand/deploy/button.svg" alt="Deploy Glance on ServOrbit" height="40"></a>

The button points to a VPS order with the template preselected. The image is served from servorbit.com — nothing to host on your side.

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Monitor your infrastructure.

Activate Glance on your infrastructure.

Dedicated Cloud VPS — IPv4 included, European datacenter, support included. Your data never leaves your server.

Recommended configuration: 512 MB RAM · 1 vCPU

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