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WriteFreely is a beautifully pared-down blogging platform that’s simple on the surface, yet powerful underneath.

It’s designed to be flexible and share your writing widely, so it’s built around plain text and can publish to the fediverse via ActivityPub. It’s easy to install and light enough to run on a Raspberry Pi.

Start a blog on our instance

Try the editor

Find another instance

Features

• Start a blog for yourself, or host a community of writers
• Form larger federated networks, and interact over modern protocols like ActivityPub
• Write on a dead-simple, distraction-free and super fast editor
• Publish drafts and let others proofread them by sharing a private link
• Build more advanced apps and extensions with the well-documented API

Quick start

Note this is currently alpha software. We’re quickly moving out of this v0.x stage, but while we’re in it, there are no guarantees that this is ready for production use.

First, download the latest release for your OS. It includes everything you need to start your blog.

Now extract the files from the archive, change into the directory, and do the following steps:

# 1) Log into MySQL and run:
# CREATE DATABASE writefreely;
#
# 2) Configure your blog
./writefreely --config

# 3) Import the schema with:
./writefreely --init-db

# 4) Generate data encryption keys
./writefreely --gen-keys

# 5) Run
./writefreely

# 6) Check out your site at the URL you specified in the setup process
# 7) There is no Step 7, you're done!

For running in production, see our guide.

Development

Ready to hack on your site? Here’s a quick overview.

Prerequisites

• Go 1.10+
• Node.js

Setting up

go get github.com/writeas/writefreely/cmd/writefreely

Configure your site, create your database, and import the schema as shown above. Then generate the remaining files you’ll need:

make install # Generates encryption keys; installs LESS compiler
make ui      # Generates CSS (run this whenever you update your styles)
make run     # Runs the application

Docker

Using Docker for Development

If you’d like to use Docker as a base for working on a site’s styles and such, you can run the following from a Bash shell.

Note: This process is intended only for working on site styling. If you’d like to run Write Freely in production as a Docker service, it’ll require a little more work.

The docker-setup.sh script will present you with a few questions to set up your dev instance. You can hit enter for most of them, except for “Admin username” and “Admin password.” You’ll probably have to wait a few seconds after running docker-compose up -d for the Docker services to come up before running the bash script.

docker-compose up -d
./docker-setup.sh

Now you should be able to navigate to http://localhost:8080 and start working!

When you’re completely done working, you can run docker-compose down to destroy your virtual environment, including your database data. Otherwise, docker-compose stop will shut down your environment without destroying your data.

Using Docker for Production

A Docker image is available at writeas/writefreely; you can use it with the included docker-compose.yml.

To setup the compose environment,

1. Modify a copy of config.ini.docker-compose and put it in the same directory as your docker-compose.yml. Edit it as appropriate (the database configuration is already setup for the compose file).
2. Modify the docker-compose.yml file with a secure mysql password. Make the config.ini.docker-compose database patchword match.
3. Run docker-compose run --rm web /bin/sh to get a shell inside a running instance of the web container.
4. Run bin/writefreely -init-db to setup the database.
5. Run bin/writefreely -gen-keys to setup your instance-specific keys.
6. Run exit to exit and remove the container.
7. Run docker-compose up -d to launch the server.
8. Point your browser to http://localhost:8080 (or whatever URL you set up) to test your instance.

Contributing

We gladly welcome contributions to WriteFreely, whether in the form of code, bug reports, feature requests, translations, or documentation improvements.

Before contributing anything, please read our Contributing Guide. It describes the correct channels for submitting contributions and any potential requirements.

License

Licensed under the AGPL.