bloglite: bloglite, a micro-blog with Markdown, syntax highlighting and phone publishing, public with the owner's own login

bloglite, a micro-blog with Markdown, syntax highlighting and phone publishing, public with the owner's own login

App	What	Who can reach it	Place
`bloglite`	bloglite, the public blog and the owner's login and editor	open to anyone	`bloglite`

Place	Memory	Disk	Architecture	GPU
`bloglite`	128 MB	1 GB	amd64, arm64	none

Why

A blog on Medium or Substack lives under that platform's terms, feed and fees. bloglite is a small micro-blog with Markdown, syntax highlighting, math and image uploads, which you publish to from your phone or laptop, on a machine you own. It has no newsletter emails and no paid members: it suits a personal or project blog, not a replacement for Substack's mailing list or paywall.

What

One app, bloglite, on none. A blog is public, so readers need no Edgible sign-in, and the owner's own login in bloglite, from BLOGLITE_ADMIN_USER and BLOGLITE_ADMIN_PASSWORD, protects publishing. bloglite has no sign-up page and no first-visit setup, so the owner exists from the first start and no prepare.sh is needed. The image is zot.huijzer.xyz/bloglite:3.0.0, from the author's own registry, and it runs on arm64 and amd64. The Compose file uses the image's own health command. The image has no shell, so a second, tiny container, bloglite-tools (Alpine), only runs the data fingerprint by reading the blog over the Compose network.

Posts, uploads and settings live in a SQLite database in the volume bloglite-data, at /data. Back it up. Minimum recommended for the place bloglite: 128 MB of memory and 1 GB of disk, on an arm64 or amd64 machine, with no GPU.

The Compose file is docker-compose.yml, the settings card.env, the card card.yml.

How

Five steps. Edit card.env before you start.

1. Fetch

mkdir -p bloglite
curl -fsSL https://github.com/edgible-org/cards/archive/refs/heads/main.tar.gz \
  | tar -xz --strip-components=2 -C bloglite cards-main/bloglite

2. Edit card.env

Set DEVICE to a name edgible device list prints, and ORG_LABEL to the part after the app name in a hostname edgible app list prints. The owner's password is generated in the next step. Set BLOGLITE_DOMAIN only if you publish on your own domain.

nano bloglite/card.env

3. Check

curl -fsSLo check-env.py https://raw.githubusercontent.com/edgible-org/card-kit/main/check-env.py
python3 check-env.py bloglite

It fills each empty secret and moves a taken port, as lines to paste. Run it again until it says no conflicts.

4. Start

docker compose --env-file bloglite/card.env -f bloglite/docker-compose.yml up -d --wait
docker compose --env-file bloglite/card.env -f bloglite/docker-compose.yml ps

--wait returns when each service is running, and healthy when it has a healthcheck. Here that means bloglite is running and its health command passes.

5. Publish

set -euo pipefail
set -a
. bloglite/card.env
set +a
device_id=$(edgible device list --json | jq -er --arg name "$DEVICE" '
  map(select(.name == $name))
  | if length == 1 then .[0].id
    else error("need exactly one device named " + $name + " (" + (map(.status + " " + .id) | join(", ")) + ")")
    end
')
edgible app create existing \
  --non-interactive \
  --name bloglite \
  --port "$BLOGLITE_PORT" \
  --protocol https \
  --auth-modes none \
  --device-id "$device_id"
edgible app list

Without Edgible: only Publish is Edgible's. The app listens on 127.0.0.1 at the port in card.env, so any reverse proxy or tunnel on the machine, such as Caddy, nginx, Cloudflare Tunnel or Tailscale, can publish it instead, and sign-in is then that tool's to provide. Every other step stays the same.

Verify

bloglite uses none.

curl -sS -o /dev/null -w '%{http_code}\n' "https://<bloglite hostname>"

The public blog, with no Edgible sign-in. Open /login and sign in as BLOGLITE_ADMIN_USER with BLOGLITE_ADMIN_PASSWORD, then write a first post.

The rest of the setup is in the bloglite docs.

Tear down

Four steps, in this order. Step 1 runs wherever edgible is logged in. Steps 2 to 4 run on the machine that runs the containers. Steps 2 and 3 read card.env, so keep it until step 4.

1. Unpublish

edgible app delete bloglite --yes

2. Stop

docker compose --env-file bloglite/card.env -f bloglite/docker-compose.yml down

3. Delete the data

Skip this step to keep the data. The loop copies each volume to a .tgz file in this directory first.

for volume in $(docker volume ls -q --filter label=com.docker.compose.project=bloglite); do
  docker run --rm -v "$volume:/data:ro" -v "$PWD:/backup" alpine tar -czf "/backup/$volume.tgz" -C /data .
done
docker compose --env-file bloglite/card.env -f bloglite/docker-compose.yml down --volumes

4. Remove the card

rm -rf bloglite

bloglite

Apps

Machine

Why