home

This guide is designed for people who want to author content using home.

home is a cozy content authoring system that resembles hugo or zola on the surface, but comes with several important distinctions.

Although a lot of things are decided at deploy time, home sites cannot be served from “dumb” object storage like S3.

Having a server component allows home to provide:

• “Log in with GitHub” / “Log in with Patreon” functionality
• A proper search experience, via tantivy
• Effortless atomic deploys, regardless of the underlying object storage

There’s a few things that home makes no compromises on:

• images are stored as JPEG-XL (or SVG)
• short videos are stored as AV1+Opus
• scripts are TypeScript, components are Svelte 5
• styles are SCSS
• templates are Jinja2
• the bundler is vite — that’s it.

In a way, this is kinda relaxing. It’s a stack that works. It’s all integrated together. There’s no anxiety about making the right choice.

home is in fact a pair of web services, mom, deployed on a dedicated hetzner server in Germany, and cub, deployed on various hetzner VMs around the world.

mom is in charge of receiving deploys, proxying to object storage, and executing derivations (image/video re-encodes, etc.)

cub is in charge of rendering templates, caching assets at the edge (= geographically close to visitors) in memory, on SSD storage, etc.

All cubs serve all the websites powered by home — which includes:

• https://fasterthanli.me
• https://bearcove.eu
• https://home.bearcove.eu
• https://facet.rs

This is why you can’t just “run home on your VPS”. I mean, you can, but it would sorta defeat the purpose — it’s designed to have that split, just like kubernetes has separate servers (control plane) and worker nodes.