Rables

A self-hosted personal blog and publishing platform, written in Go. The whole app ships as a single static binary — templates, assets and migrations are embedded — with SQLite as the only datastore. It is a Go port of a Rails original; the schema and routes deliberately mirror the Rails behavior.

Writing & publishing

• Articles and standalone pages with a Markdown editor (EasyMDE) and image/file uploads
• Draft / publish / schedule / trash / shared states; scheduled publishing runs as background jobs
• Optional public route prefix for article URLs (per-request live setting)
• Uploaded HTML archives served under /archives/{kind}/{id}/

Feed & discovery

• Full-site RSS at /feed.xml, per-tag RSS at /tags/{slug}.rss, sitemap.xml
• Tags with published-article counts

Engagement

• Threaded comments with math captcha (HMAC-signed tokens) and admin moderation
• Newsletter: native SMTP sender or listmonk, double opt-in subscribe/confirm/unsubscribe, per-tag subscriptions
• Crossposting to Mastodon, Twitter/X, Bluesky and Xiaohongshu, with automatic comment fetch-back on a schedule
• Ongoing Twitter/X timeline sync
• Optional giscus integration, custom head code and custom CSS

Site management (admin)

• Regex redirects, static file hosting, social links, timezone, meta/SEO fields
• Background job dashboard (/admin/jobs) with stale-job recovery, activity log
• Import/export: full-site transfer (DB + files ZIP), RSS import, Markdown import; cmd/migrate-content converts legacy rich_text content to Markdown in place

Security

• Session-cookie auth, rate-limited login/password/subscription endpoints
• Origin checks on state-changing requests, SSRF guard for outbound fetches
• Strict file permissions: data dir 0700, database 0600

Requires Go 1.26+.

HMAC_SECRET="$(openssl rand -hex 32)" go run ./cmd/server

Open http://localhost:8080/setup to create the admin account, then log in at /session/new. All runtime state lives in ./data (SQLite rables.db + uploaded files/); migrations run automatically at boot.

See deploy/README.md for the full guide: hardened systemd unit, Docker (distroless, ~48 MB image), backups with deploy/backup.sh, and the rich-text → Markdown upgrade path.

# Binary
CGO_ENABLED=0 go build -trimpath -ldflags="-s -w" -o rables-server ./cmd/server

# Docker
docker build -t rables .
docker run -d -e HMAC_SECRET="$(openssl rand -hex 32)" -p 8080:8080 \
  -v rables-data:/data --restart unless-stopped rables

cmd/server            HTTP server entrypoint (wiring, graceful shutdown)
cmd/migrate-content   One-off rich_text → Markdown content migration tool
internal/httpd        chi router, handlers, middleware, rate limiting
internal/service      Domain services (articles, comments, crosspost,
                      newsletter, subscribers, transfer, twittersync, ...)
internal/domain       Pure content logic (markdown, sanitize, slug, excerpt)
internal/jobs         DB-backed job queue + cron scheduler
internal/db           SQLite open/migrate; sqlc-generated queries in db/query
internal/templates    Embedded html/template files
internal/assets       Embedded CSS/JS
migrations            Embedded goose migrations (run at boot)
queries               sqlc query sources

• Run tests: go test ./...
• Regenerate sqlc code after editing queries/ or migrations/: go tool sqlc generate
• Add a migration: create migrations/NNNN_name.sql with goose -- +goose Up / -- +goose Down sections; it applies on next boot.

The database is pure-Go SQLite (modernc.org/sqlite), so builds are CGO-free and cross-compile cleanly.

See LICENSE.