Banner designed by Sabrina W. Reid (@sans_mercy_)
Archie: Adventures in Self-hosting
I had an old HP ProBook 640 laying around, and wanted to give it new life as a web server. I got a free domain from noip.com, and made this website to run on it — from the backend to this page!
The server runs on Arch Linux, with a custom-built Rust backend, using the Axum framework. For the guestbook, I'm using a MySQL database to store and retrieve the entries, as well as log homepage hits. For the Letterboxd List downloader, I used Python, fully parallelized for maximum efficiency.
The whole setup is fully Dockerized, with the server, database, and Letterboxd app each running in their own containers, orchestrated across several server nodes via Kubernetes. Changes are deployed only after a passing a full test suite using GitHub Actions and Ansible.
This project was all hand-coded, with no AI assistance beyond Google's overview results (and even then, only sparingly). You can see all the code used to serve this webpage on GitHub.
I hope you enjoy this little project of mine — I sure have!