Installing the command-line executable

Assuming you have Rust/Cargo installed, run this command in a terminal:

cargo install insight

It will make the insight command available in your PATH if you've allowed the PATH to be modified when installing Rust. cargo uninstall insight uninstalls.

Back to the crate overview.

Readme

insight

insight is a web server allowing you to edit markdown articles and host the rendered result publicly.

Features

customizable homepage (it's an article as well)
anonymous and email-protected articles (sending emails requires easy DKIM/SPF configuration)
CSS queries-based light/dark theme selection
on-disk JSON database → easy backups
easily dockerized

To-do

email templates
automatic deletion of anonymous posts after configurable duration

Setup

Install the Rust toolchain
Get insight:

$ cargo install insight

Create config.json:

{
    "domain-name": "i.l0.pm",
    "dkim-private-key-path": "dkim.pem",
    "dkim-selector": "insight2022",
    "articles-dir": "articles",
    "mail-dir": "mail",
    "mail-username": "insight",
    "listen-address": "127.0.0.1:9090",
    "new-article": "new",
    "manage": "manage",
    "home": "home",
    "allow-creation": true
}

Create required directories:

$ mkdir articles mail

Start the server:

$ insight -c config.json

This will accept requests from all IP addresses

Access the server from a web browser to generate the home page: http://localhost:9090/
Edit your home page
Save the home page edition link (which is secret) to be able to edit it again later
Go to http://localhost:9090/new to create other posts.

Security considerations

HTML tags are currently stripped from posts at render-time to prevent cross-site scripting vulnerabilities. We rely on the pulldown_cmark crate to detect these tags. If you manage to get any JS code to execute in the post viewer via markdown, please file an issue because it shouldn't happen.