Blogo is a light and easy blogging engine. No complicated extras, just a straightforward blog.
Now, here's the twist: Blogo can also publish your posts to Nostr for backing them up and getting even more reach. Lift your ideas higher!
/raw to any article link to get the raw markdown!The easiest way to self-host Blogo is by using Docker.
services:
blogo:
image: pluja/blogo:latest
container_name: blogo
restart: unless-stopped
volumes:
- ./articles:/app/articles
ports:
- "127.0.0.1:3000:3000"
environment:
# CONFIG
BLOGO_TITLE: Blogo
BLOGO_DESCRIPTION: A blog built with Blogo!
BLOGO_KEYWORDS: blog,open source
BLOGO_URL: http://localhost:3000
#BLOGO_ANALYTICS: '<script defer src="https://my.analytics.site/script.js"></script>'
TIMEZONE: UTC
# NOSTR CONFIG
PUBLISH_TO_NOSTR: false
#NOSTR_NSEC: ""
#NOSTR_RELAYS: "wss://nostr-pub.wellorder.net,wss://relay.damus.io,wss://relay.nostr.band"Edit the docker-compose.yml file to fit your needs.
Run blogo:
docker compose up -dBlogo is now available at http://localhost:3000. You can now create your first article.
Using Blogo is pretty simple. Once you have blogo running, you can create new articles by just running blogo -new my-post-slug, where my-post-slug is the slug of the post (used in the url). This will create a new template in the articles folder. Edit that file with your favorite text editor. Once done, save it and Blogo will take care of the rest (yes, it auto-reloads).
If you're on docker, you can run
docker exec -it blogo blogo -new my-post-slugto create a new post.
Blogo uses YAML metadata to get the post info. The metadata is located at the top of the file, between --- and ---.
Here's a list of the available metadata fields:
Title: The title of the post. This will also be used as the title for sharing and SEO.Author: The author of the post.Summary: The summary of the post. This is used in the index page. This will also be used as the description for sharing and SEO.Image: The image of the post. This is used as the post thumbnail / header image. This will also be used as the thumbnail when sharing.Tags: The tags of the post. Must be a list of strings. This will also be used as the keywords for SEO.Date: The date of the post. Must be in the format YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM.Draft: Whether the post is a draft or not. Must be true or false.Layout: The layout of the post. For now, only post is available.NostrUrl: The url to the Nostr content. If set to 0 it will disable the posting of that article to Nostr even if Nostr publishing is enabled.To create an about page, just create a file called about.md in the articles folder. Blogo will automatically detect it and create a link to it in the navbar.
To add your own static content, you can just bind-mount any folder to /app/static/your-folder.
For example if you are using docker compose, you can add:
volumes:
- ./img:/app/static/imgThen you can just use /static/img/your-image.jpg in the markdown to add an image.
The
/app/staticfolder contains the css styles needed for styling Blogo. For this, it is recommended to always create subfolders with bind mounts inside.
If you set the PUBLISH_TO_NOSTR variable in the docker-compose.yml file to true, Blogo will publish your posts to Nostr. By default, Blogo will generate an ephemeral key (changes on every restart) and use a default relay list.
You can change either of these defaults by setting any of these variables in the docker-compose.yml file:
NOSTR_NSEC - expects a valid nsec key. If you set this key, your posts will be always published for the same key, even on restarts.
blogo -nkeys.NOSTR_RELAY_LIST - expects a comma-separated list of relays (with protocol); eg. wss://relay1.com,wss://relay2.net.You can avoid publishing a particular post to Nostr by setting the
NostrUrlmetadata field in the post tofalseor0.Posts are published to Nostr as Long-Form events following the definition in NIP-33.
You can add analytics to your blog by setting the BLOGO_ANALYTICS variable in the docker-compose.yml file to your analytics script. Blogo will automatically add it to the bottom of the page. Make sure to put it all in a single line!
BLOGO_ANALYTICS='<script defer src="https://my.analytics.site/script.js"></script>'You can customize the look and feel of your blog by editing the templates and CSS.
The templates are located in the templates folder:
base.html: The base template. All other templates extend this one.
Blogo.index.html: The index template. This is the template used for the index page, where the posts are listed.
post.html: The post template. This is the template used for the post reading page.
about.html: The about template. This is the template used for the about page.The templates are written in Golang Templates, and the CSS is written in TailwindCSS and pure CSS. Feel free to tweak them to your liking.
The CSS is located in the static/css folder.
The main content makes use of TailwindCSS classes, so you can just tweak that to your liking. Note: You will need to rebuild the TailwindCSS using npx for new classes to apply.
The rendered Markdown is styled with pure CSS. You can tweak that in the
static/css/markdown.cssfile. All markdwon is wrapped inside adivwith themarkdownid, so you can use that to style it.
You can easily add custom stylesheets to any page. Place the stylesheet into the static/css/ folder. Then, just use the extra block from the template to link them. (take a look at the post.html template and look for the extra block to see how it's done).