BloKi - A minimalistic Blog and Wiki Engine

If you are looking for a small, simple, easy to use, micro blog/wiki platform that looks like WordPress / MediaWiki, but loathe the bloat of the LAMP stack, this might be just for you.

Main features

• No PHP, Apache, Nginx, JavaScript, Java, SQL and any other cruft.

• The themes and web based Admin UI resembles WordPress and MediaWiki, but without all the baggage.

• Articles and media are stored as regular files. Apart from web admin - editable in any editor of your choice! Versioned by Git.

• The server software is a single file, statically linked, self contained binary. Runs on most modern OSes without any external dependencies, scripting runtimes, libraries, etc. Easily host your blog on a Raspberry PI, small VM, Docker container, Lambda or Cloud Run function.

• BloKi supports all the modern web browsers, as well as lower end, older, legacy, vintage and even text mode.

Current status

• Basic blog engine and admin UI works.
• Search, pagination, markdown, images, etc.
• Git support.
• MacOS, Linux, *BSD, AIX, Windows and Plan9 support.
• You can see a working example on dogfood blog

Running BloKi

To try BloKi, download a binary from the releases page. Run it like so:

chmod 755 bloki
./bloki

A sample starting post will be created, which you can edit using any editor of your choice.

Web Admin

BloKi web admin is available under /bk-admin/ url, defined by -admin_uri flag. In order to log in for the first time, a user will need to be created from command line. You can use the user command to list, delete users and set passwords. To create a user, simply set their password. The secrets file is required for this. Example:

bloki -secrets /path/to/bloki.secrets  user  passwd  admin
New Password: ...

Currently there is no 2FA so please use a strong password.

Site Directory

By default BloKi looks for ./site in the current directory. You can specify your own site folder with -root_dir /path/to/site flag.

Service Files

Sample systemd configuration files are provided. Similar to any other web server, BloKi will require either a privileged account or set of capabilities to bind to port 80 and 443. When using the secrets file, it is recommended to start BloKi as root with -chroot and -setuid flags. This way BloKi can open the secrets store before entering chroot. However you can also chroot and setuid from systemd.

Docker

The Docker Hub image name is: tenox7/bloki:latest

Hello world:

docker run -it --rm -p 8080:8080 -v /home/tenox/site:/site tenox7/bloki:latest

Full site example with auto SSL/TLS cert:

docker run -d \
    --restart=always \
    -p 80:8080 \
    -p 443:8443 \
    -v /home/myuser/site:/site \
    -v /home/myuser/bloki.secrets:/bloki.secrets \
    tenox7/bloki:latest \
    -site_name "My Blog" \
    -subtitle "Blog about cool shit" \
    -addr :8443 \
    -acm_addr :8080 \
    -acm_host blog.mysite.net \
    -secrets /bloki.secrets \
    -chroot
    -setuid 1000:1000

FastCGI

Probably:

bloki -addr 127.0.0.1:9000 -fastcgi

Auto SSL/TLS Certs / ACME / Lets Encrypt

BloKi supports automatic certificate generation using Lets Encrypt / ACME. The keys and certs are stored in the secrets file. Simply add following flags:

bloki \
    -secrets /path/to/my/bloki.secrets \
    -addr :443 \
    -acm_addr :80 \
    -acm_host blog.mysite.net \
    ...

Customizing look and feel (templates)

By default BloKi ships with pre-built templates for convenience. If you want to customize your site look and feel, create a folder site/templates, download the default template(s) and customize them. If you don't care for old browsers just edit modern.html. Modified templates will be picked up on start.

There also is a new "seven eleven" template. Installation:

mkdir site/templates
curl -Lo site/templates/modern.html https://raw.githubusercontent.com/tenox7/BloKi/main/templates/seveneleven.html
curl -Lo site/media/seveneleven.jpg https://raw.githubusercontent.com/tenox7/BloKi/main/templates/seveneleven.jpg

Restart BloKi.

Legal

Copyright (c) 2024 by Antoni Sawicki

Licensed under Apache-2.0 license