[HN Gopher] Show HN: Self-hosted CMS on serverless Cloudflare
___________________________________________________________________
Show HN: Self-hosted CMS on serverless Cloudflare
Author : wenbin
Score : 208 points
Date : 2022-12-27 11:42 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (github.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
| worldmerge wrote:
| Very cool! I like how there is a nice visual editor. I hate using
| markdown for blogging.
| orliesaurus wrote:
| I use bearblog.dev, super minimalistic, markdown first,
| customizable...not self hosted but.. nice overall!
| [deleted]
| atmosx wrote:
| I use middleman[^1] + bulmaCSS + FontAwesome but host on github
| using the `github.io` domain and upload podcasts to
| "archive.org"[^2]. I choose this setup to make sure content will
| survive as much as possible.
|
| ps. You might want to consider a donation to the internet
| archive, see [^2] - no affiliation, just a happy user.
|
| [^1]: https://middlemanapp.com/
|
| [^2]: https://archive.org/
| [deleted]
| spaniard89277 wrote:
| I just use PicoCMS and upload my markdown files through FTP. I
| don't think there's anything out there that can compete with the
| simplicity of this solution, not even static site generators.
|
| It uses templates with Twig, and it's very simple PHP so you can
| host it anywhere.
|
| I once hit the frontpage of a big aggregator from my country and
| it handled like it was nothing from a very cheap shared hosting.
|
| From my Linux Mint laptop, all it takes is to open my FTP on
| Thunar (which involves a click in my sidebar), and I'm navigating
| it like any other file system. Right click, create file, write &
| format my post, and save the file.
|
| Viola, it's published.
|
| Oh, and you can mix Markdown with HTML and JS in your posts. Less
| stuff you need to learn.
| synergy20 wrote:
| is picocms still a static site? cms like drupal,wordpress can
| control content access with password,which is where cms stands
| out.
| gernb wrote:
| There are different definitions of simple. I found wordpress
| simple because I could access the UI to post from any device. I
| could upload images, save drafts, and preview posts. My static
| site, basically requires a desktop/laptop PC and to preview I
| have to build the site. This is far less simple to use even if
| it's simpler to run
| stefanvdw1 wrote:
| I would argue that using something like Nuxt/Content[0]is even
| simpler. I create a new markdown file in my website's local
| repo, write the content and commit if it's ready for
| publishing. No need for the FTP step and version control is
| build in.
|
| This setup is also completely free since the content lives on
| GitHub and my static site on render.com (but any static site
| hosting will work).
|
| And since it's Nuxt based, it automatically also supports more
| advanced features such as tagging, advanced queries and
| filtering.
|
| Can only recommend it!
|
| 0. https://content.nuxtjs.org
| indigodaddy wrote:
| Looks like free tier for render.com static sites is 100G
| egress per month. While this is sufficient for a low traffic
| site, I'd probably want to protect myself by putting
| Cloudflare (or some other free CDN) in front (yes I realize
| that render.com has their own CDN network in front, but
| that's still wrapped inside the 100G free tier limit it looks
| like).
| revskill wrote:
| The hardest part to me, is install PHP.
| indigodaddy wrote:
| There are tons of very cheap hosting providers who are stable
| and have been around a long time. You could look at
| buyshared.net which is the webhosting arm of buyvm.net.
| prox wrote:
| What is good solution for hosting a domain anonymously? I want
| to start blogging but don't want to do a personal one just yet.
| I mean anonymous in lightweight general sense, not political
| activist super security.
| Dma54rhs wrote:
| WhoisGuard and similar are in this case enough for privacy.
| voytec wrote:
| WHOIS[1] masking hides your information from the world. It's
| a service provided by some domain sellers who, obviously,
| will know those details (given them by you), as well as your
| financial information as you can't usually lease domains
| using untraceable transactions.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WHOIS
| prox wrote:
| Thank you going to look into that!
| [deleted]
| JonathanBeuys wrote:
| Why mix the type of software (A CMS for certain use cases) with
| the distribution mechanism (Cloudflare Pages etc)?
|
| Shouldn't that be two seperate issues?
| [deleted]
| ldoughty wrote:
| My guess would be:
|
| Traditional CMS you do the setup and plumbing in the server
| because you have full control
|
| Static website hosting you prebuild a website and push it up
| all complied and done but in a standard supported format, do it
| easily can go to different providers.
|
| There's not much in between, because you can't (easily) write
| code that is happy to run in two different systems controlled
| by other people with different plumbing under the hood... It's
| certainly doable, but the more you generalize the more
| complicated your code gets... and the less you can benefit from
| the vendor specific stuff (e.g. removing features that one side
| does not support ... Or adding code to use it if it's there --
| which makes code even more complicated)...
|
| Edit: and to the point of code complexity: if you did this all
| yourself in an alpha release, you likely would make a
| company/product like forestry (mentioned elsewhere in this
| discussion) because you've made something some people would
| consider somewhat or very valuable
| leetrout wrote:
| This looks fantastic. I just started a podcast and was planning
| to test publishing with cloudflare since it seems much cheaper
| than the alternatives (and planning to backup to storj).
|
| I will try this out this week!
| throwaway81523 wrote:
| "Self hosted" and "serverless Cloudflare" each have their
| attractions, but they are contradicting terms, unless I'm
| confused.
| [deleted]
| lloydatkinson wrote:
| Running it on cloudflare by provisioning it yourself instead of
| using something dedicated like wordpress or contentful.
| 0b01 wrote:
| This still makes no sense at all. Self hosting means running
| a program on your own machine instead of on a cloud platform
| such as cloudfalre.
| geek_at wrote:
| There is an ongoing debate in the selfhosting subreddits if
| it's self hosted if it's not on your hardware.
|
| Seems yes for rented servers like hetzner but gets more
| heated when it's about "serverless"
| lloydatkinson wrote:
| So what do you want to call it then? "Running on a lower
| level general compute abstraction with provided networking
| infrastructure" instead of self-hosted?
| kennywinker wrote:
| This isn't directly related to the post, but it's a CMS related
| question: does anybody know of a simple "static file" CMS that
| also lets you deploy server side javascript functions? It's a
| weird use case, so I suspect there may not be. I've solved it by
| using a static site generator and a nginx reverse proxy to a node
| server - but it's a lot of complexity for my use case (using
| stripe to sell stuff, but stripe checkout requires server side
| session creation).
|
| Edit: Netlify Edge functions seems to be pretty much exactly what
| I'm describing (drop js/ts files in a directory, deploy with your
| static site). The only problem with it for me is it's not self-
| hosted. Serveless functions would work, tho the separate
| deployment adds a layer of complexity, and I'd have to learn CORS
| finally lol
| surfpel wrote:
| Not exactly what you asked for, but if you use S3 + CloudFront,
| you can use javascript functions in CloudFront that can modify
| the request to/from the client & to/from the S3 bucket. Does
| things like URL redirects, header manipulation, auth... I use
| it to redirect ~/path/to/item/ to ~/path/to/item/index.html for
| my static site.
|
| https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonCloudFront/latest/Develope...
| IanCal wrote:
| Netlify? Edge functions and functions may be what you're after
|
| https://www.netlify.com/products/#netlify-edge-functions
| kennywinker wrote:
| Oh very cool! Yeah, Netlify Edge functions are pretty much
| exactly what I'm after... except I was hoping for something
| self-hosted.
| IanCal wrote:
| Maybe don't focus so much on the static site part, and have
| a very slightly dynamic site where the majority of your
| content is just paths that lead to stuff in /static. So
| rather than trying to bolt a dynamic bit to static hosting,
| making the simplest site with something like server.js
| mmcnl wrote:
| Isn't this what serverless functions are for? Vercel, Netlify,
| Firebase would suit your needs.
| somishere wrote:
| Cloudflare Pages works well as a serverless option for this,
| and without the separate deployment for functions, so no CORS
| required. Couldn't recommend more.
| jacooper wrote:
| How is it self hosted and hosted cloudflare at the same time ?
| manigandham wrote:
| You host it on your own Cloudflare account.
| ocdtrekkie wrote:
| Are you self-hosting your pictures when you upload photos to
| your Google Photos account?
| manigandham wrote:
| No. Self-hosting refers to running a _service_ where you
| completely own the source code. You can run this on a
| computer in your room, or a rented VPS, or a serverless
| hosting option like Cloudflare Pages.
|
| For example, if you run a Nextcloud instance and upload
| pictures there, then you are self-hosting your photos.
| webmobdev wrote:
| Self-hosting means the ability to host and run the code on
| your own server (home or webhost). Since Microfeed is built
| on the _cloud services_ offered by Clouflare, you
| technically can 't run it _independently_ on your own
| server as you will still have to use the Clouflare
| services: microfeed uses Cloudflare Pages
| to host and run the code, R2 to host and serve media files,
| D1 to store metadata, and Zero Trust to provide logins to
| the admin dashboard.
|
| @jacooper is correct that the term has been wrongly used by
| the creator.
| ldoughty wrote:
| Is this GitHub repo were looking at self hosted because
| it's his accounts repo?
|
| I think you can ask 3 people this question and get 5
| answers to where the "self hosting" line is drawn...
|
| I am not sure were I would draw this line myself :-)
| jacooper wrote:
| Thats not self hosting, is it?
| manigandham wrote:
| It's a hosting service where you host your own copy of the
| code. It's no different than getting a VPS and doing the
| same thing.
|
| If you have no access to the code then it would qualify as
| being hosted for you.
| moooo99 wrote:
| Most people consider self-hosting as "running service x
| yourself", which I think i fair considering most people
| treat self-hosting as an alternative to SaaS offers
| lopkeny12ko wrote:
| Cloudflare is a SaaS.
| moooo99 wrote:
| No, Cloudflare is a company that offers many products.
| And the services utilized by the project (Pages, D1, R2)
| would most likely be classified as PaaS by most.
| [deleted]
| ocdtrekkie wrote:
| "Self-hosted on Cloudflare" feels like an oxymoron. I know it's
| common for people to consider hosting on VPS and the like to be
| self-hosting, but attached to proprietary services seems to be a
| step further, I think something being portable between providers
| has to be a minimum for the term.
|
| I like the idea of having web content you can put up with minimal
| configuration and cost but we have to draw a line for that
| definition somewhere.
| [deleted]
| colesantiago wrote:
| It seems there is a growing movement of headless CMSs, but I am
| afraid of vendor lock-in with Cloudflare and the like.
|
| Are there any other CMS's that people are using these days?
| Perhaps looking forward to be using in 2023?
| addandsubtract wrote:
| Strapi[0] is great and Payload[1] also looks promising.
|
| [0] https://strapi.io/
|
| [1] https://payloadcms.com/
| programmarchy wrote:
| Directus (https://directus.io)
| Existenceblinks wrote:
| Any new name in town? My perception is that 2022 is pretty much
| web2 stagnation due to a lot of things.
| chedabob wrote:
| Forestry has been on my radar for a long time but never had a
| need to use it https://forestry.io/
|
| The big draw for me is it's just Hugo/Gatsby/Jekyll underneath,
| and the output files can be delivered anywhere that will host
| static files (CloudFlare pages does this really well, as does
| Netlify).
| jobsdone wrote:
| Forestry is shutting down and pushing people to Tina instead.
| I guess it is the same company? I don't really know.
| mynameisvlad wrote:
| Considering the infobox on the Forestry site directs users
| to Tina with:
|
| > _Our team_ is working on a V2 product. See it at Tina.io
| (in beta).
|
| I'm going to go ahead and say it's the same people.
| Dma54rhs wrote:
| Forestry is a dead product. Netlifly CMS seems dead as well,
| only the CMS part though.
| nonrandomstring wrote:
| Please don't use this unless you wish to exclude those who would
| like to enjoy your content but also respect their privacy.
| Cloudflare continue to block Tor traffic by default. It is
| discriminatory against innocent users and harmful to freedom of
| speech (because speech also requires the ability to listen).
| mikeiz404 wrote:
| Are they blocking you outright or are you required to do
| captchas?
|
| From a 2016 post CloudFlare states they don't block Tor traffic
| and don't let their customers block the traffic either but they
| will put restrictions such as captchas in place [1].
|
| 1: https://blog.cloudflare.com/the-trouble-with-tor/
| nonrandomstring wrote:
| Sometime last year I discussed this in more detail. I use a
| text only browser with Tor. Most websites (still > 80% maybe)
| load well, but the overwhelming majority of those that do not
| are served via Cloudflare.
|
| To me, their 2016 post claiming not to "block Tor traffic" is
| disingenuous, since they are exceedingly hostile to it. I
| only ever experience Cloudflare as an obstacle and nuisance
| online.
|
| I also deeply dislike their attitude and PR stand, which is
| essentially victim blaming and disrespectful of those who
| make different technological choices. Their message seems to
| be; "We make an effort to sound sorry to
| those who are harmed by our business model. But you are
| a minority, and we make a lot of money. If you want to
| make an omelet, you gotta break some eggs. Now get out
| of the road."
| [deleted]
| clarkrinker wrote:
| Nice setup! I've been following Vercel and Cloudflare trying to
| sync up their v8 isolates runtime: CF is going to be a great
| option for running these "Edge Style" React apps once stuff
| stabilizes.
| Yair-Dovrat wrote:
| Super cool. Thanks for sharing, going to set this up over the
| weekend!
| F117-DK wrote:
| Seems very nice! Looking forward to have something like Supabase
| or Pocketbase deployed directly on Cloudflare! _fingers crossed_
| dangoor wrote:
| Given that this uses multiple Cloudflare services, is anyone very
| familiar with their pricing? The readme lists a "generous free
| tier", but I always have to wonder what happens once you fall
| outside of that tier. I remember that R2 is cheap (one of its
| distinguishing features), but wonder if any of the other services
| suddenly become $50 a month or something.
| 015a wrote:
| Cloudflare's free tiers are hard-free; they stop working if you
| exceed the free tier usage (at least for compute; storage is
| different).
|
| Pages is essentially totally free. R2 is within the same
| pricing magnitude as S3. D1 is a very new product and afaik is
| still in beta and doesn't have production pricing yet; so be
| weary there. Zero Trust is less usage and more per-user, I
| think $7/mo/user.
| Telemakhos wrote:
| > be weary I've seen this mistake three or four times
| recently, and it's starting to make me wonder why I keep
| seeing it so often now, when I didn't before. "Wary" (like
| "beware") means "cautious"; "weary" (like to "wear" someone
| out) means "tired."
| dangoor wrote:
| Thanks! That's very helpful and sounds unlikely to get out of
| control (short of hosting a wildly popular video)
| psytrx wrote:
| They definitely have sensible backout mechanisms for their
| free tiers (i.e. Pages, they still serve static assets but
| disable compute/Functions). Also, their docs are written
| pretty well, and openly hint at dangerous price traps.
|
| We launched a big presale this year with an e-commerce app
| hosted on Workers, and we just barely hit the 5$ threshold
| for the paid plan. Did not use more services (other than
| DNS/proxy) though, so YMMV.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2022-12-27 23:00 UTC)