Haven

Self-Hosted

Private, ad‑free blogging for friends and family

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Updated 8 days ago

Overview

Discover what makes Haven powerful

**Haven** is a lightweight, privacy‑centric blogging platform written in **Ruby on Rails**. It exposes a web interface for authoring Markdown posts, managing user accounts, and customizing appearance via CSS or custom fonts. The core idea is to give developers a self‑hosted, low‑bandwidth solution that can run on anything from a Raspberry Pi to a cloud VM. Unlike commercial blogs, Haven intentionally rejects self‑signups and third‑party tracking, making it ideal for personal or family content.

Private RSS

Media Handling

No JavaScript Frameworks

Custom CSS / Fonts

Overview

Haven is a lightweight, privacy‑centric blogging platform written in Ruby on Rails. It exposes a web interface for authoring Markdown posts, managing user accounts, and customizing appearance via CSS or custom fonts. The core idea is to give developers a self‑hosted, low‑bandwidth solution that can run on anything from a Raspberry Pi to a cloud VM. Unlike commercial blogs, Haven intentionally rejects self‑signups and third‑party tracking, making it ideal for personal or family content.

Key Features

Private RSS: Each user can generate a secure RSS feed that only authorized readers consume. The built‑in reader lets you follow friends’ feeds without exposing them to public search engines.
Media Handling: Images, videos, and audio uploads are automatically downscaled or transcoded to reduce bandwidth. No external CDN is required unless you choose to add one.
No JavaScript Frameworks: The UI relies on vanilla JS and server‑side rendering, keeping the footprint small (≈ 50 KB) and making it accessible on low‑end devices or slow networks.
Custom CSS / Fonts: A simple admin panel allows you to override the default theme with arbitrary stylesheets, giving full control over look and feel.
Extensibility: The application exposes a RESTful API for posts, users, and feeds. Webhooks can be added via the config/webhook.yml file to notify external services on events such as post creation or user addition.

Technical Stack

Layer	Technology
Framework	Ruby on Rails 7 (ActionCable for real‑time updates)
Database	PostgreSQL (production) or SQLite3 (development / demos)
Background Jobs	Sidekiq + Redis for media processing and email notifications
Web Server	Puma (default) behind Nginx or Apache as a reverse proxy
Containerization	Dockerfile and docker‑compose for local development; Helm charts available via KubeSail
Deployment	Cloud‑agnostic scripts (`deploy-aws.rb`, `cleanup-aws.rb`) that provision EC2, RDS, and ACM certificates

The absence of heavy JavaScript frameworks means the Rails asset pipeline (Webpacker) is only used for optional admin scripts; most pages are served as pure HTML/CSS.

Core Capabilities & APIs

REST API: /api/v1/posts, /api/v1/users with JSON payloads. Supports pagination, filtering by tags, and full‑text search via PostgreSQL tsvector.
Webhooks: Configurable endpoints triggered on events (post.created, user.invited). Payloads are signed with HMAC for security.
RSS/Atom Feeds: GET /feeds/:user_id.atom or .rss. Supports Basic Auth for private feeds.
Markdown Rendering: Uses Redcarpet with a custom renderer that sanitizes HTML and embeds media links.
Image Proxy: All uploaded images are served through a proxy that resizes on demand (via mini_magick) to the requested dimensions, ensuring consistent bandwidth usage.

Deployment & Infrastructure

Haven is designed for self‑hosting but offers multiple deployment pathways:

Docker Compose: A single docker-compose.yml spins up Rails, PostgreSQL, Redis, and Nginx. Ideal for local or home‑server use.
Kubernetes: A Helm chart is bundled with the repo; KubeSail provides a pre‑configured template that manages secrets and scaling automatically.
AWS: The deploy-aws.rb script provisions an EC2 instance, RDS PostgreSQL, and ACM certificate. It also sets up a CloudWatch log group for monitoring.
PikaPods / Heroku: Quick‑start options that abstract away the underlying infrastructure, though Heroku’s free tier is now deprecated.

Scalability is handled by horizontally scaling Sidekiq workers and the Rails app behind a load balancer. For media storage, you can swap out local disk for an S3 bucket via the aws-sdk-s3 gem, preserving the same API surface.

Integration & Extensibility

Plugins: While Haven does not ship a formal plugin system, developers can fork the repo and add custom controllers or background jobs. The modular Rails structure makes it straightforward to inject new services.
Third‑Party Auth: OAuth2 providers (Google, GitHub) can be integrated via omniauth to replace the native auth flow if desired.
Custom Webhooks: By editing config/webhook.yml, you can hook into any external service (e.g., Slack, Mattermost) to receive real‑time updates.
Theme Engine: The app/views/layouts/application.html.erb template loads a user‑supplied CSS file, enabling dynamic theming without code changes.

Developer Experience

Configuration: Environment variables control everything from database URLs to email SMTP credentials. The config/initializers folder contains clear documentation for each setting.
Documentation: A comprehensive README.md, API reference, and deployment guides are included. The codebase follows Rails conventions, making onboarding quick for seasoned Ruby developers.
Community & Support: Hosted on GitHub under the MIT license, issues and pull requests are actively managed. The project’s lightweight nature means there is minimal maintenance overhead compared to larger CMSs.