rlog

Rlog is a minimalistic blog/portfolio starter project intended to be used for a personal blog.

The project is built using only Rust, HTML and CSS as to remain as lightweight and performant as possible.

Inspiration

Rlog was inspired by Bearblog, a similar project written in Django. If you're looking for a blog that you can edit online, definitely use Bearblog.

Usage

If you wish to use rlog for your own blog, it is recommended to fork the project, as to not interfere with the project's development.

Rlog is a self-hosted project, meaning that you will need to host it on your own server.

Without Docker

To build the project, you will need to have Rust installed on your machine.

To run the project, run the following command:

cargo run

This will start a server on localhost:8080, which you can access in your browser.

To build the project for production, run the following command:

cargo build --release

This will create an executable in the target/release directory, which you can run to start the server.

./target/release/rlog

You will have to move the rlog executable to the root of the project, so it has access to the posts, templates and static directories.

With Docker

Rlog can also be run using Docker. The Dockerfile and docker-compose.yml files are already provided in the project. All that is needed to run the project is to build the Docker image and run the container, using the following command:

docker-compose up -d

This will start a container running the project on localhost:8080.

Additional notes

To host the project on a server, you will need to configure a reverse proxy to forward requests to the service running the project. I will not go into detail on how to do this, as it is out of the scope of this project. Creating, running and hosting a service is not unique to rlog.

NOTE: This project is completely free to use and modify, all I ask is that you leave the made with rlog footer in the project.

Features

Currently, there are 4 distinct pages in the project:

• Home
• About page
• Contact page
• Blog page

The blog page is the only dynamic page in the project, as it reads the blog posts from a posts directory and parses, formats and displays them on the page.

Using the blog

Pages

Each of the pages in the project are stored in the templates directory. Each page is a directory containing a content.md file, a [page].html file and an meta.toml file.

The only thing you need to edit to customize the page is the content.md file, which is going to be the actual markdown content shown on the page.

You can also edit the browser title, meta description and navigation title in the meta.toml file.

Posts

The blog posts are written in markdown, while their metadata is stored in a TOML file. You will find an example of a blog post in the posts directory. The metadata file is used to store the title, slug and date of a blog post, while the markdown file has the actual content of the post.

Images

Images can be used in any of the markdown files. To use an image, you can use a URL of an image hosted online, but it is not recommended.

The best way to use an image in a post or page is to store the image in the static/assets directory and reference it in the markdown file.