A self-hostable Go weblog engine — a lighter path between WordPress and Hugo. Small to place, familiar to publish.

🌐 go.serenebach.net — features, screenshots, positioning 📄 Japanese: see README.ja.md

At a glance

• Single statically-linked Go binary, no CGO
• SQLite via modernc.org/sqlite (pure Go) — no separate database server
• Runs as a long-lived HTTP server, or as a CGI program on traditional shared hosting
• Embedded admin UI, MCP server, and end-user help — nothing extra to deploy
• Static rebuild for hybrid hosting (CDN / static front, dynamic admin behind)
• Imports content from legacy Serene Bach v2 (flat-file) and v3 (SQLite) installations
• Outbound webhooks (entry / comment / image events) for Slack / Discord / Zapier / n8n

Quick start

Requires Go and Task.

task dev    # serves on :8080 (auto-creates the dev DB on first request)

Open http://localhost:8080/ in a browser. The first request to a database without an admin user redirects to /setup, where you create the administrator account and choose whether to insert a couple of sample entries. After that, the public site lives at / and the admin UI at /admin/login.

task dev also sets SB_DEV=1, which disables template and i18n caching so edits to web/templates/admin/*.html are reflected on the next request without restarting the server.

Prefer the CLI? task seed still works — it creates the dev DB and seeds an admin (admin / changeme by default; override via SB_ADMIN_NAME / SB_ADMIN_PASSWORD) without going through the browser flow.

A .env template ships at .env.example. Copy it to .env and fill in SB_AI_SECRET if you plan to enable the AI writing assists.

Server-mode HTTP timeouts and graceful shutdown have sensible defaults out of the box and can be tuned via SB_READ_HEADER_TIMEOUT, SB_WRITE_TIMEOUT, SB_IDLE_TIMEOUT, SB_MAX_HEADER_BYTES, and SB_SHUTDOWN_TIMEOUT. Set SB_TZ (e.g. Asia/Tokyo) to pin the timezone used for archive month/year boundaries and rendered entry dates so the same binary produces identical output regardless of the host clock. See docs/configuration.md for the full list.

Run serenebach --version to print the version of the binary you have on disk and exit. The flag works even when the database or environment configuration is missing or broken, so it is safe to use for identifying a freshly unpacked build.

Docker

# Build
docker build -t serenebach .

# Run: start the server and open http://localhost:8080/setup to create the admin user
docker run -d -p 8080:8080 -v serenebach-data:/home/nonroot/data serenebach

# Or seed via CLI with an explicit password
docker run --rm -v serenebach-data:/home/nonroot/data -e SB_ADMIN_PASSWORD=<secret> serenebach seed

Or use the bundled docker-compose.yml:

docker compose up -d

Pre-built images (GHCR)

Official container images are published to GitHub Container Registry (ghcr.io/serendipitynz/serenebach).

docker pull ghcr.io/serendipitynz/serenebach:latest

docker run -d -p 8080:8080 -v serenebach-data:/home/nonroot/data ghcr.io/serendipitynz/serenebach:latest

Available tags:

• latest — most recent build on the default branch
• Release tags (4.0.0-beta.N, 4.0.0, …) — see the GitHub Releases page for the current version
• main — tip of the main branch

For production, prefer a pinned release tag over latest. See docs/deployment.md for QNAP Container Station and VPS deployment examples.

Quality checks

CI runs the same checks on every push and pull request:

• task lint — runs golangci-lint against .golangci.yml (covers staticcheck plus the project lint set, including gocyclo at the goreportcard threshold of 15)
• task test — runs go test ./...

Companion tools

Documentation

License

MIT. See the file for the full text.