github.com/glanceapp/glance

Glance is a self-hosted dashboard server, not a library you embed in applications. It's designed to aggregate feeds, weather, and widgets into a personal homepage. The operational experience reveals significant gaps for production use.

The server lacks essential resource management features. There's no built-in connection pooling configuration for its HTTP client, no circuit breakers for upstream feed failures, and minimal observability hooks beyond basic logging. When RSS feeds are slow or unreachable, the entire dashboard refresh can hang with no granular timeout controls per feed source. Memory usage grows unbounded during long-running instances when fetching media-heavy feeds.

Configuration is YAML-based and requires full restart for changes—no dynamic reloading. Error handling for malformed feeds is brittle, often logging generic errors without context about which widget failed. The refresh intervals are global rather than per-widget, making it difficult to balance fresh data against API rate limits. For personal use on a home server it works, but lacks the operational maturity needed for multi-user or reliability-critical deployments.

Glance is a self-hosted dashboard application rather than a library you'd import into Go projects. It's designed to run as a standalone binary with YAML configuration. The setup experience is refreshingly simple - download the binary, create a config file, and you're running. However, this isn't a library with APIs to integrate; it's an end-user application.

From a DX perspective, the YAML configuration schema lacks strong validation and type safety. You'll discover configuration errors at runtime, and error messages can be cryptic when widget configurations are malformed. There's no schema file for IDE autocompletion in your config YAML, which would significantly improve the configuration experience. Documentation covers the basics but lacks depth on advanced customization scenarios.

If you need to extend Glance with custom widgets or data sources, you'll need to fork and modify the Go codebase directly. There's no plugin system or extensibility API, which limits its utility for teams with specific dashboard requirements beyond what's built-in.

Glance is actually a self-hosted dashboard application, not a general-purpose library. It's designed to run as a standalone web server that aggregates widgets like RSS feeds, weather, and calendar events. This creates confusion for anyone expecting a typical Go package they can embed or extend programmatically.

From an operations standpoint, it's concerning. The application spawns multiple goroutines for widget refresh cycles with minimal configuration hooks for timeouts or rate limiting. Error handling in widget fetchers tends to silently fail or log at INFO level, making it difficult to trace issues under load. There's no built-in connection pooling configuration for the HTTP clients it uses internally - it relies on Go's defaults which may not suit your environment.

Configuration is YAML-based and relatively inflexible for programmatic use cases. There's no graceful shutdown implementation that properly drains in-flight requests or completes widget refreshes. Resource cleanup is implicit, and you can't easily inject observability hooks without forking. If you need a quick personal dashboard, it works, but treating it as production infrastructure requires significant wrapper code.