A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.
Rules:
Be civil: we're here to support and learn from one another. Insults won't be tolerated. Flame wars are frowned upon.
No spam posting.
Posts have to be centered around self-hosting. There are other communities for discussing hardware or home computing. If it's not obvious why your post topic revolves around selfhosting, please include details to make it clear.
Don't duplicate the full text of your blog or github here. Just post the link for folks to click.
Submission headline should match the article title (don’t cherry-pick information from the title to fit your agenda).
No trolling.
Resources:
Any issues on the community? Report it using the report flag.
Questions? DM the mods!
https://www.sphinx-doc.org/ + https://pradyunsg.me/furo/ theme + https://myst-parser.readthedocs.io/ markdown parser + https://sphinx-design.readthedocs.io/ extensions.
Just drop all your markdown files in a directory and run sphinx-build. Highly customizable but also works out of the box
I want to second Pelican for Python. Really easy to set up and get going. No need to learn a complicated templating language (it's jinja2, which is what everything uses).
Thanks for the recommendation!
In case you're familiar with Obsidian, there's Quartz: quartz.jzhao.xyz/ Runs in docker too, practically zero config to start
Thanks for the recommendation!
Quarto is probably the most unique one I've seen so far. Thanks for the input.
Zola. Similar to Hugo, but newer and written in Rust.
I used Zola for a while, but at the end of the day there wasnt enough themes available that fit what I was looking for. I ended up messing with the templating engine to get what I needed.
I suggest OP choose Hugo over Zola, in the hopes that they find a theme that suits them best and for the most part prevents them from having to touch templating to begin with.
I use Hugo and I've been pretty happy with it. It has a lot of layout templates you can use out of the box so you don't need to learn a new templating language unless you want to do customizations. I write blogs in markdown and it's automatically rendered and published.
But as soon as you do want to customize it, you're stuck learning one of the most esoteric languages that wasn't meant as a joke.
Thanks for the heads up. That feels like the same roadblock I got with 11ty. It ran OK on markdown, but one you dig into how wide the customizations go I couldn't keep up.
I used Hugo for my portfolio site, and it's great if you like an existing theme, but making one from scratch is a challenge. The documentation is unclear and there's a chicken and egg problem about how to learn Hugo.
The go templating is OK, I prefer other syntax but it works.
It's a GUI app that runs on your local system and pushes sites to a server.
I’m planning on porting my Wordpress site to this. I haven’t used it yet but based on what I’ve read it will be easier than Hugo.
Thank you for the recommendation!
Another deer!? 😱
Lol yes another gd deer, just got the car back yesterday.
Seconded. OP, if you can write Markdown, Hugo will turn it into a website.
Thank you for the recommendation!
And best of luck with the repair. That's a crazy bill estimate.
This might be what you're looking for: Zola
Single binary that lets you keep your markdown/config in git and just build it from the git clone folder you're in at the time.
I know some people that have moved off of Hugo to this, and Alex from the Selfhosted podcast recently talked about it on their show.
I think mkdocs is easier than hugo but less flexible in terms of capability. However it serves all my needs (list of webpages accessible from a central frontpage)
Thanks!
Try Publii. It does everything for you. You can even set up the FTP upload.
Use Publii, it has a WYSIWYG editor, a block editor and a markdown editor. It creates the files on your PC and can upload it to your server. Just point your webserver to the uploaded folder.
Very beginner friendly ☝🏻
Thanks for the recommendation!
I found pelican to be quite simple to start with and depending on how deep you want to go it can be quite customizable. Being proficient in python helps.
Quartz or mkdocs
Thanks for the recommendations!
Have you checked out grav https://learn.getgrav.org/17/basics/what-is-grav
https://github.com/getgrav/grav
I use it just to make simple markdown sites for info like my gaming servers or if I feel like making a random blog post
Technically Grav is not a static site generator, it is just a flat file cms. It means there is no need to generate all the files of website and upload them to server each time you write a post. I have no idea why people like static sites for blogging.
As the sibling comment says, not a static site generator. If you want to customize pretty much anything about the layout or theming you still need to use Twig, CSS and if you're unlucky JS.
Thanks for the recommendation. I actually did look at grav a while back, but I can't recall why I moved on. Will give it another pass.
Docusaurus. It's all markdown.
Will give that a look, thanks!
Thanks for the rec! Looks awesome; Imma try it :)
Oof. Meta open source. Srsly sus. •͡˘㇁•͡˘
Codeberg Pages if you don't mind a give-or-take weekly 30 min downtime. GitHub Pages if you do. GitLab Pages if you have a creditcard which they require to verify your identity.
I recently switched to Codeberg Pages and it's the first time I'm hearing about a weekly downtime. Is there somewhere this is documented or I can read more about it?
“Honestly, I am completely unsure how to proceed with the pages server.
It might be the best idea to deprecate it.”
I did try setting up 11ty, despite my misgivings over node.js. Using Markdown went OK, except it wouldn't render explicit tag parameters to allow me to do one-off formatting.