Deploy glance on Vercel or Netlify or Railway

[vishalkadam47]

is there a way to Deploy glance on Vercel or Netlify, any config required i did try with netlify but facing some go version errors and if I change the version as I get dependencies error.
if anyone has working config vercel.json or netlify.toml would be helpful
or render.com

[ken-morel]

I am not sure vercel supports golang... but one option I have used was, railway.
pros:

• Supports several build languages
• Provide interesting project structure
• Beautiful UI
  cons:
• it is Paid 😞, offers $5 free trial, if you just deploy glance instance, should take months to finish(exept you need to frequently update glance.yml)

I dropped my glance instance, but deploying it just now for you to have an example...

[ken-morel]

Sorry, let me try try find back the fix I used last time(I am really poor in Dockerfile). The dockerfile I provided fails to copy the glance.yml into the path where glance will find it. You could try to copy the glance.yml or modify where glance searches for it.

[vishalkadam47]

do i need to add glance.yml file in the repo

[ken-morel]

Yes, it will take its configuration from there. But the dockerfile should properly copy the glance.yml

[ken-morel]

My glance instance at https://glance-production.up.railway.app/
I could not use normal docker to copy the glance.yml to the root directory, it seems the repository is not entirely cloned... but a turnaround was to download the glance.yml using curl, here my code

FROM golang:1.22-alpine AS builder  
WORKDIR /app  
COPY go.mod go.sum ./
RUN go mod download  
COPY . .  
RUN go build -o myapp .  
FROM alpine:latest
# Install curl to download glance.yml from repository
RUN apk add --no-cache curl  
WORKDIR /app  
# update the username and repository names to yours please
RUN curl -o glance.yml https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ken-morel/glance/main/glance.yml    
COPY --from=builder /app/myapp /myapp  
ENTRYPOINT ["/myapp"]

[vishalkadam47]

I'm using https://gist.github.com/ for glance.yml, now I can edit and update yml whenever required without unwanted commits

[ken-morel]

Also checking for vercel...

[ken-morel]

My glance instance at https://glance-production.up.railway.app/
I could not use normal docker to copy the glance.yml to the root directory, it seems the repository is not entirely cloned... but a turnaround was to download the glance.yml using curl, here my code

FROM golang:1.22-alpine AS builder  
WORKDIR /app  
COPY go.mod go.sum ./
RUN go mod download  
COPY . .  
RUN go build -o myapp .  
FROM alpine:latest
# Install curl to download glance.yml from repository
RUN apk add --no-cache curl  
WORKDIR /app  
# update the username and repository names to yours please
RUN curl -o glance.yml https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ken-morel/glance/main/glance.yml    
COPY --from=builder /app/myapp /myapp  
ENTRYPOINT ["/myapp"]

[vishalkadam47]

thanks, it worked but only reddit links are showing error

[ken-morel]

Sorry, surely does reddit not support requests from railway services public IPs, I donot know a fix for that

[vishalkadam47]

no problem for now I have removed reddit links

[svilenmarkov]

This is a known limitation - Reddit blocks VPS IPs. You can get around this by routing the traffic from Glance through a VPN or routing through a proxy hosted on your home network and using the request-url-template property.

[ken-morel]

[ken-morel]

I tried moving the index.go to repository root, but now vercel does not detect it and serves the page as static. The only way seems to adapt glance to the /api based urls from vercel... or to build other packages for other routes... working on that!

[ken-morel]

Well, seems vercel can definitely not deploy glance:

• It only permits index.go file in /api/ from my seen
  what does not adapt to glance's routing, I am working on a special thing which will adapt to that. But you will need to do some changes

[ken-morel]

well. gave up!

[svilenmarkov]

I'm not sure this is worth the hassle as Glance was never meant to work in a serverless environment. The whole point of serverless is you accept a request, run a function, respond and then shut down. Glance relies on being a long running process that can cache and reuse widget data in memory. You'd have to rewrite a lot of stuff to get it to play nicely with serverless. Not impossible, just... not worth it when you can run a dozen instances of Glance on a $15 Raspberry Pi Zero W.

[vishalkadam47]

@ken-morel thanks buddy for taking time and thanks for helping me with railway.
I was just looking for a way to deploy it somewhere in the cloud publicly and https://railway.app/ works as I was looking for, now I don't have to pay for a VM server just to run Glanceapp
@svilenmarkov Thanks for the information, I have used vercel and netlify for other dashboard apps so I thought Glance would also work.

[vishalkadam47]

@ken-morel
when using custom.css do we need to add any line of code in Dockerfile because as of now if i use assets-path in glance.yml Is not working when redeployed. please guide me

server:
  assets-path: ./assets
theme:
  custom-css-file: "/assets/custom.css"

[ken-morel]

Oh, 😆 I feel so stupid. I forgot the .dockerignore!
Please, simply delete the .dockerignore, and modify the dockerfile to something more simple:

FROM golang:1.22-alpine AS builder
COPY . .
RUN go mod download
RUN go build -o /glance .
ENTRYPOINT ["/glance"]

This worked for me.
My deployment at https://glance.up.railway.app/

[ken-morel]

Please, @vishalkadam47 You selected the answer earlier, update it to that just above.

[vishalkadam47]

deployment works but the css is not working

[ken-morel]

No really!, mine has no issue, please compare your repository to mine at https://github.com/ken-morel/glance (notice the assets/custom.css and deleted .dockerignore) and view the output at https://glance.up.railway.app/

[ken-morel]

Delete the .dockerignore, and modify the .dockerfile:

FROM golang:1.22-alpine AS builder
COPY . .
RUN go mod download
RUN go build -o /glance .
ENTRYPOINT ["/glance"]

This worked for me.
My deployment at https://glance.up.railway.app/ (including custom css)

This implies all your assets including glance.yml are present in the repository.

[vishalkadam47]

got it working now, I missed the part of deleting .dockerignore

[vishalkadam47]

I'm using glance.yml from Gist

FROM golang:1.22.5-alpine
WORKDIR /app
COPY . .
RUN go mod download
RUN go build -o app .
# Install curl to download glance.yml
RUN apk add --no-cache curl
# Download glance.yml from the specified gist
ARG GLANCE_FILE
RUN curl -o glance.yml $GLANCE_FILE
EXPOSE 8080
ENTRYPOINT ["./app"]