September, 6, 2024 archives

When I wanted to get away from using Discord to participate in the online PHP and IndieWeb communities, I did still want a web-based interface that provided access to the backlog of conversations from when I was offline, which IRC servers don’t generally do on their own.

I landed on using The Lounge, which has worked out very well.

I run it on my home server in Docker and it is exposed to my Tailscale tailnet so if I ever was on the road, I could still access it. The configuration is pretty straightforward. There’s a docker-compose.yml file:

version: '3.9'

services:
    tailscale:
        image: tailscale/tailscale:latest
        hostname: thelounge
        env_file: ./.env
        environment:
          - TS_SERVE_CONFIG=/config/thelounge.json
          - TS_STATE_DIR=/var/lib/tailscale
        volumes:
          - ts_state:/var/lib/tailscale
          - ./config/tailscale:/config
          - /dev/net/tun:/dev/net/tun
        cap_add:
          - net_admin
          - sys_module
        restart: always

    backend:
        image: ghcr.io/thelounge/thelounge:latest
        env_file: ./.env
        volumes:
          - lounge_state:/var/opt/thelounge
        expose:
          - "9000/tcp"
        restart: always

volumes:
    ts_state:
    lounge_state:

And config/tailscale/thelounge.json:

{
    "TCP": {
      "443": {
        "HTTPS": true
      }
    },
    "Web": {
      "${TS_CERT_DOMAIN}:443": {
        "Handlers": {
          "/": {
            "Proxy": "http://backend:9000"
          }
        }
      }
    },
    "AllowFunnel": {
      "${TS_CERT_DOMAIN}:443": false
    }
}

There is an .env file that sets TS_AUTHKEY and TS_EXTRA_ARGS. It looks kind of like this:

TS_AUTHKEY="tskey-client-{something}?ephemeral=false"
TS_EXTRA_ARGS="--advertise-tags=tag:container --reset"

I did a first cut of moving my bookmarks on to this site instead of using Pinboard.

I still need to wire up a way to create new bookmarks, but that should be pretty straightforward.

Each bookmark can carry with it an excerpt and a comment. That way I can clip a little text for the bookmark while I’m creating it. None of the existing bookmarks use that yet because Pinboard did no such thing.

Things to be done aside from adding a way to add bookmarks include adding an Atom feed, really wiring them up to search, figure out how to be marking these up in a more IndieWeb-friendly way, and thinking about whether I want to take snapshots of the bookmarks. (Those would probably only be accessible to me to avoid copyright headaches.)