Glance Files

Another big update is here! This one includes authentication, a theme switcher, new customization options, a to-do widget and lots of improvements to existing widgets. Before we get to details of all that...

Feedback wanted

Deciding what features to add to a project like this is no easy task. Most self-hosted services focus on doing one thing and adding features around that thing, but with a personal dashboard/feed aggregator you can practically display anything, so how do you decide what does and doesn't belong? So far I've been prioritizing feature requests with a high number of upvotes and those I believe fit with the vision of the project, although admittedly Glance has deviated quite a bit from its initial purpose.

As with almost all communities, a minority of people are very vocal about their wants and needs, while the majority are just riding along. Rather than guessing what the community as a whole would benefit from the most moving forward, I thought I could just ask through a short survey.

Link to the survey

It's entirely anonymous, should only take about 1 to 3 minutes to complete, and I'd be happy to share the results once there are enough responses. Thank you to those who take the time to fill it out.

Jump to section

• Community widgets
• New logo
• New features
  • Nested config includes and new include syntax
  • Using Docker secrets within the config
  • Theme switcher
  • Authentication
  • To-do widget
  • Hiding widget titles
  • Head widgets
  • Separate navigation and page widths
  • PWA configuration
• Widget enhancements
  • [Docker containers] Container customization in the config, support for proxies, category and format-container-names properties
  • [Custom API] Synchronous API calls and options property
  • [Reddit] Support for application auth
  • [RSS] Conditional requests
  • [Monitor] basic-auth and timeout properties
  • [DNS Stats] Support for Technitium

Community widgets

If you weren't aware, there's now a repository for widgets made by the community with 40+ widgets available so far. Most are made using the custom-api widget, so adding them is as simple as copying them into your glance.yml. It's a great place to find new widgets, and if you have a widget that you think others would benefit from, please consider sharing it there. Thank you to everyone who has contributed!

New logo

Big thanks to @Tom607 for offering help with the logo and going over dozens of different iterations!

I believe it does a great job at conveying the widgety layout of Glance, while also being simple and clean, as is the rest of the design language.

New features

Nested config includes and new include syntax

Up until now, you could only use the !include directive in your glance.yml file, but not within any of the included files. This has been changed so that you can includes files from within included files as many times as you need, meaning you can have a separate file for each page, a separate file for each column, and even a separate file for each widget if you wanted to:

glance.yml
├── home.yml
│   ├── column1.yml
│   │   ├── widget1.yml
│   │   └── widget2.yml
│   └── column2.yml
│       ├── widget3.yml
│       └── widget4.yml

In addition, the !include directive can now instead be written as $include. The reason for this change is that it turns out !include, with the way it was used in Glance, is not actually valid YAML (whoops), meaning it makes YAML validators and syntax highlighters angry. The new $include syntax is valid YAML and will be the preferred syntax moving forward. You can also add a - at the beginning of a line when including array items, since that's the expected syntax for YAML arrays.

Before:

:::yaml
theme:
  !include: theme.yml

pages:
  !include: home.yml
  !include: homelab.yml
  !include: startpage.yml

Now:

:::yaml
theme:
  $include: theme.yml

pages:
  - $include: home.yml
  - $include: homelab.yml
  - $include: startpage.yml

Using Docker secrets within the config

Along with environment variables, you can now use Docker secrets in your config file using the following syntax:

:::yaml
token: ${secret:github_token} # Reads the contents of /run/secrets/github_token
token: ${GITHUB_TOKEN} # Environment variable

(thanks @gomeology)

Theme switcher

You can now define multiple theme presets and switch between them in the UI, no more config changes needed to change the theme!

View config

:::yaml theme: presets: neon-focus: background-color: 255 14 6 primary-color: 156 50 65 negative-color: 342 65 65 contrast-multiplier: 0.9 text-saturation-multiplier: 0.8 gruvbox-dark: background-color: 0 0 16 primary-color: 43 59 81 positive-color: 61 66 44 negative-color: 6 96 59 catppuccin-macchiato: background-color: 232 23 18 contrast-multiplier: 1.2 primary-color: 220 83 75 positive-color: 105 48 72 negative-color: 351 74 73 peachy: light: true background-color: 28 40 77 primary-color: 155 100 20 negative-color: 0 100 60 contrast-multiplier: 1.1 text-saturation-multiplier: 0.5

Glance will include its own default dark and light themes in the list of presets, which you can override by using the default-dark and default-light keys.

(thanks @hecht-a)

Authentication

You can now add authentication via username and password:

:::yaml
auth:
  secret-key: # this must be set to a random value generated using the secret:make CLI command
  users:
    admin:
      password: ${ADMIN_PASSWORD}

While there is support for multiple users, you cannot customize the dashboard per user at this time, so all users will see the same dashboard.

To generate the secret key, use the secret:make CLI command:

:::bash
docker run --rm glanceapp/glance secret:make

Or with the binary:

:::bash
/opt/glance/glance secret:make

If you do not want to store plain passwords in environment variables or in files, you can hash your password and provide it via the password-hash property instead:

:::yaml
auth:
  secret-key: # this must be set to a random value generated using the secret:make CLI command
  users:
    admin:
      password-hash: $2y$10$...

To hash your password, use the password:hash <password> CLI command:

:::bash
docker run --rm glanceapp/glance password:hash mypasswordishunter2

Or with the binary:

:::bash
/opt/glance/glance password:hash mypasswordishunter2

To-do widget

A fairly simple to-do widget with the ability to add, edit, reorder and delete tasks:

:::yaml
- type: to-do

There are a number of keyboard shortcuts available that make it easier to use, which you can find over at the config docs.

The tasks are stored in the browser's local storage, so they won't be available on all devices. If you want to add multiple todo widgets, you must specify a unique id for each one:

:::yaml
- type: to-do
  title: Work tasks
  id: work

- type: to-do
  title: Personal tasks
  id: personal

(thanks @AMS003010)

Hiding widget headers

A fairly simple addition, but one that's been requested quite a few times - you can now hide widget headers by setting the hide-header property to true:

:::yaml
widgets:
  - type: calendar
    hide-header: true

If you do this for all widgets, you get something like this:

Note that you cannot hide the header of the group widget since it's used to switch between each widget.

Head widgets

You can now define "head widgets" on each page, which are basically widgets that sit above all columns and take up the full width. Combined with the hide-header property, you get something like this:

View config

:::yaml pages: - name: Home head-widgets: - type: markets hide-header: true markets: - symbol: SPY name: S&P 500 - symbol: BTC-USD name: Bitcoin - symbol: NVDA name: NVIDIA - symbol: AAPL name: Apple - symbol: MSFT name: Microsoft columns: - size: small widgets: - type: calendar - size: full widgets: - type: hacker-news - size: small widgets: - type: weather location: London, United Kingdom

This works well for displaying mostly horizontal widgets such as the videos widget, RSS widget with horizontal-cards style, or widgets which span their items horizontally, such as the markets widget.

Separate navigation and page widths

You can now have different desktop navigation and content widths:

:::yaml
pages:
  - name: Home
    width: slim
    desktop-navigation-width: wide
    columns:
      ...

By default desktop-navigation-width will inherit the value of width, but can explicitly be set to a different value (default, slim or wide). Using this property, if one of your pages has a different width than the rest, you can set the navigation to be the same width as the rest of the pages, meaning no more jankiness when switching between pages of different widths!

PWA configuration

You can now configure PWA things such as the app name, icon and theme color:

:::yaml
branding:
  app-name: Not Glance
  app-icon: /assets/path/to/icon.png
  app-background-color: '#000000' # ideally in hex format, since support for other formats is inconsistent between browsers

(thanks @dvdpearson)

Widget enhancements

[Docker containers] Container customization in the config, support for proxies and category property

Instead of using docker labels to customize the containers, you can now do so within your glance.yml:

:::yaml
- type: docker-containers
  containers:
    container_name_1:
      title: Container Name
      description: Description of the container
      url: https://container.domain.com
      icon: si:container-icon
      hide: false

    container_name_2:
      title: Other Container Name
      description: Other description of the container
      url: https://other-container.domain.com
      icon: si:container-icon
      hide: false

(thanks @mike391)

You can now also specify a proxied docker socket URI instead of a path to a socket file:

:::yaml
- type: docker-containers
  sock-path: http://docker-socket-proxy:2375 # tcp:// also works

(thanks @retmas-gh)

The new category property allows you to split up categories of containers into different widgets:

glance.yml:

:::yaml
# This will only list containers which have the glance.category label "tools"
- type: docker-containers
  title: Tools
  category: tools

# This will only list containers which have the glance.category label "arr"
- type: docker-containers
  title: Arr
  category: arr

docker-compose.yml:

:::yaml
services:
  my-container:
    image: my-image
    labels:
      glance.category: tools

  my-other-container:
    image: my-image
    labels:
      glance.category: arr

(thanks @shareef945)

[Custom API] Synchronous API calls and options property

So far you could only run asynchronous API calls, meaning you couldn't use the result of one API call in another. There is now support for synchronous API calls within the template itself:

:::yaml
- type: custom-api
  url: https://api.example.com/get-id-of-something
  template: |
    {{/* The ID is taken from the first API call */}}
    {{ $theID := .JSON.String "id" }}

    {{/* Then used in the second API call */}}
    {{
      $something := newRequest (concat "https://api.example.com/something/" $theID)
        | withParameter "key" "value"
        | withHeader "Accept" "application/json"
        | getResponse
    }}

    {{ $something.JSON.String "title" }}

You can optionally add query parameters using withParameter, headers with withHeader, and turn the request method into POST with a string body via withStringBody. This also means that you can conditionally execute requests within if statements, unlike with the subrequests property which executes all requests every time the cache expires.

In addition, the url property is now optional, meaning you can execute requests solely within the template. This is useful if you need to supply dynamic parameters to the endpoint:

:::yaml
- type: custom-api
  title: Events from the last 24h
  template: |
    {{
      $events := newRequest "https://api.example.com/events"
        | withParameter "after" (offsetNow "-24h" | formatTime "rfc3339")
        | getResponse
    }}

    {{ if eq $events.Response.StatusCode 200 }}
      {{ range $events.JSON.Array "events" }}
        <div>{{ .String "title" }}</div>
        <div {{ .String "date" | parseTime "rfc3339" | toRelativeTime }}></div>
      {{ end }}
    {{ else }}
      <p>Failed to fetch data: {{ $events.Response.Status }}</p>
    {{ end }}

There's a new options property which allows you to specify configurable options within the widget, rather than within the template.

View example

Instead of defining options within the template and having to modify the template itself like such: :::yaml - type: custom-api template: | {{ /* User configurable options */ }} {{ $collapseAfter := 5 }} {{ $showThumbnails := true }} {{ $showFlairs := false }}

{{ if $showThumbnails }}
• 
{{ end }} {{ if $showFlairs }}
• {{ .JSON.String "flair" }}
{{ end }}

You can use the `.Options` object to retrieve and define default values for these variables: :::yaml - type: custom-api template: | {{ $collapseAfter := .Options.IntOr "collapse-after" 5 }} {{ $showThumbnails := .Options.BoolOr "show-thumbnails" true }} {{ $showFlairs := .Options.BoolOr "show-flairs" false }}

{{ if $showThumbnails }}
• 
{{ end }} {{ if $showFlairs }}
• {{ .JSON.String "flair" }}
{{ end }}

This way, you can optionally specify the `collapse-after`, `show-thumbnails` and `show-flairs` properties in the widget configuration: :::yaml - type: custom-api options: collapse-after: 5 show-thumbnails: true show-flairs: false Which allows you to reuse the same template multiple times with different options: :::yaml # Note that `custom-widgets` isn't a special property, it's just used to define the reusable "anchor", see https://support.atlassian.com/bitbucket-cloud/docs/yaml-anchors/ # The contents of the widget could also be included from its own file custom-widgets: - &example-widget type: custom-api template: | {{ .Options.StringOr "custom-option" "not defined" }} pages: - name: Home columns: - size: full widgets: - <<: *example-widget options: custom-option: "Value 1" - <<: *example-widget options: custom-option: "Value 2" Currently, the available methods on the `.Options` object are: `StringOr`, `IntOr`, `BoolOr` and `FloatOr`.

[Reddit] Support for application auth

Instead of using a proxy to bypass Reddit's restrictions of VPS IPs, you can now use your own Reddit application credentials to authenticate with Reddit's API:

:::yaml
- type: reddit
  subreddit: technology
  app-auth:
    name: ${REDDIT_APP_NAME}
    id: ${REDDIT_APP_CLIENT_ID}
    secret: ${REDDIT_APP_SECRET}

To create an app on Reddit, go to this page.

(thanks @s0ders)

[RSS] Conditional requests

RSS feeds are usually the slowest widgets to load, leading to longer than necessary loading times. To help with this, the RSS widget now supports conditional requests, meaning it will use either the ETag or Last-Modified headers provided by the server, if available, to conditionally request the feed only if it has changed since the last request. This should speed things up in some cases and make sysadmins a little happier.

(thanks @charlesharries)

[Monitor] basic-auth and timeout properties

The monitor widget now has support for basic authentication and a timeout property:

:::yaml
- type: monitor
  cache: 1m
  title: Services
  sites:
    - title: Jellyfin
      url: https://jellyfin.yourdomain.com
      icon: si:jellyfin
      timeout: 10s

    - title: Gitea
      url: https://gitea.yourdomain.com
      icon: si:gitea
      basic-auth:
        username: ${GITEA_USERNAME}
        password: ${GITEA_PASSWORD}

(thanks @logoff, @ejsadiarin and @FabianK3)

[DNS Stats] Support for Technitium

The DNS stats widget now has support for Technitium DNS:

:::yaml
- type: dns-stats
  service: technitium
  token: ${TECHNITIUM_TOKEN}

(thanks @anarqist and @KevinFumbles)

Fixes

• Fixed an issue with the weather widget where some locations were not being returned properly (thanks @MooToYou)
• Fixed an issue with some widgets where user-provided URLs were being escaped when they shouldn't be (thanks @Kamalaja)

Thank you

Thank you to everyone who has continued to sponsor the project, and to those who have contributed in any way. I really appreciate it!

Merged PRs

• Added Technitium Service Option to DNS-Stats Widget by @KevinFumbles in https://github.com/glanceapp/glance/pull/339
• feat(monitor): add basic-auth feature for protected sites by @ejsadiarin in https://github.com/glanceapp/glance/pull/367
• feat: add parameters and array parameters support by @ralphocdol in https://github.com/glanceapp/glance/pull/378
• fix: full width clickable link for monitor-site by @ralphocdol in https://github.com/glanceapp/glance/pull/405
• feat: custom-api multiple API queries by @ralphocdol in https://github.com/glanceapp/glance/pull/385
• make title-url of pihole and pihole-v6 default to /admin by @ralphocdol in https://github.com/glanceapp/glance/pull/466
• Add bing and perplexity as search engines by @jpinz in https://github.com/glanceapp/glance/pull/476
• Add Kagi and Startpage as search engines by @stripedew in https://github.com/glanceapp/glance/pull/480
• Add replaceMatches function to custom-api by @ralphocdol in https://github.com/glanceapp/glance/pull/542
• Add filter on already seen links for RSS feeds by @HtFilia in https://github.com/glanceapp/glance/pull/494
• added unique to filter arrays with unique items in custom-api by @ralphocdol in https://github.com/glanceapp/glance/pull/580
• [sensors] allow sensor readings when there are warnings by @anxdpanic in https://github.com/glanceapp/glance/pull/583
• Support embed icons on bookmarks URLs by @hitalos in https://github.com/glanceapp/glance/pull/578
• Dynamize manifest.json with configurable options by @dvdpearson in https://github.com/glanceapp/glance/pull/602
• update error reporting for custom-api JSON validation by @anxdpanic in https://github.com/glanceapp/glance/pull/594
• Feat: Added support for configuring Docker containers through glance.yaml instead of labels by @mike391 in https://github.com/glanceapp/glance/pull/453
• Minor design tweak, polishing up the polyline corners by @mmshivesh in https://github.com/glanceapp/glance/pull/623
• feat: Use conditional requests for RSS feeds by @charlesharries in https://github.com/glanceapp/glance/pull/462
• feat: theme switcher by @hecht-a in https://github.com/glanceapp/glance/pull/299
• v0.8.0 by @svilenmarkov in https://github.com/glanceapp/glance/pull/648

New Contributors

• @KevinFumbles made their first contribution in https://github.com/glanceapp/glance/pull/339
• @ejsadiarin made their first contribution in https://github.com/glanceapp/glance/pull/367
• @jpinz made their first contribution in https://github.com/glanceapp/glance/pull/476
• @stripedew made their first contribution in https://github.com/glanceapp/glance/pull/480
• @HtFilia made their first contribution in https://github.com/glanceapp/glance/pull/494
• @anxdpanic made their first contribution in https://github.com/glanceapp/glance/pull/583
• @hitalos made their first contribution in https://github.com/glanceapp/glance/pull/578
• @dvdpearson made their first contribution in https://github.com/glanceapp/glance/pull/602
• @mike391 made their first contribution in https://github.com/glanceapp/glance/pull/453
• @mmshivesh made their first contribution in https://github.com/glanceapp/glance/pull/623
• @charlesharries made their first contribution in https://github.com/glanceapp/glance/pull/462

Full Changelog: https://github.com/glanceapp/glance/compare/v0.7.13...v0.8.0