mayankdedhia / haven

Self-hostable private blogging

Haven

Haven is a simple blog application (formerly called SimpleBlog) built with Ruby on Rails, some motivating philosophies:

• Privacy-first. This is for sharing with friends and family, not commercial endevors. If you want a blog for your company, you probably want to use WordPress instead
• Easy to use.
• Low-bandwidth friendly. Images get downscaled to reduce page load times. No javascript frameworks. No ads or trackers.
• Customizable. If you want to add custom CSS, you can do that
• No spam. There is no self-signup for users so there is no place for unauthorized users to impact your life

Deployment

AWS

• Register an account with AWS, the included scripts deploy to an AWS EC2 instance
• Buy a domain with AWS route 53, this is the domain that will point to the blog
• Setup your AWS credentials: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/sdk-for-java/v1/developer-guide/setup-credentials.html
• Clone this project onto your computer (tested with Mac OS Mojave and Ubuntu 18.04)
• Go to the deploymentscripts folder
• Execute ruby deploy-aws.rb <domain> "<email>"
  • Put your email address in quotes, this email is used for registering your HTTPS certificate
• Wait. Deployment can take 20 minutes.
• The script will show you your login information, enjoy your blog
• Note: if anything goes wrong, you can run ruby cleanup-aws.rb <domain> to tear down everything the script created
• If you get this error: cannot load such file -- aws-sdk-ec2 (LoadError), then type gem install aws-sdk and try again

Raspberry Pi (Only tested with Pi Zero W)

Note, this requires a little bit more technical knowledge. You know know how to flash an SD card and how to use the tools ssh and scp. You should also be able to configure your own DNS and port forwarding. We're doing this fully headless, not plugging in a display or mouse/keybord to the Raspberry Pi.

• Configure your DNS to point to your home IP address.
  • If you're using AWS Route53 for your DNS, this script might be useful: https://github.com/havenweb/r53_dynamic_dns
• Flash a micro SD card with Raspbian-Lite (Feb 2020)
  • http://downloads.raspberrypi.org/raspbian_lite/images/raspbian_lite-2020-02-14/
• Enable SSH and Wifi: https://raspberrytips.com/raspberry-pi-wifi-setup/
• Insert the card into the Pi, and turn it on
• Make sure you can SSH to the Pi, then copy deploymentscripts/deploy-pi.sh from this repository to the Pi's home directory
  • Note, the script assumes your default home directory of /home/pi and that you're using the default pi user.
• Configure your home router to forward port 80 (http) and 443 (https) to the Raspberry Pi.
  • You might also want/need to configure a static IP address for the Raspberry Pi.
• SSH to the Pi and run: bash deploy-pi.sh DOMAIN "YOUREMAIL"
• Wait. On the Raspberry Pi Zero W, installation can take over three hours.
• The script will give you your initial login information, enjoy your new blog!
• Note, there are no backups setup. You may want to backup the database (PostgreSQL) and uploaded images (/home/pi/simpleblog/storage).