SQLite is all you need for durable workflows

Nothing public at the moment, unfortunately. I was kind of surprised at the lack of Very Simple scripts to just host a site for a handful of users easily. So I wrote one that focuses on:

    Unlimited-length posts in a chronological feed. You don't have to subscribe to everyone - having something appear in your feed is opt-in.
    Circles. Subscribing to someone into a hobby can get noisy. Circles give the hobby a place, for those that want to check.
    RSS everywhere: Anyone can add an RSS feed to the server, and anyone can view all the subscribed feeds and choose which to follow. They are not part of the home feed, but a separate section. Every feed (circle, user) has a public-to-the-internet feed and a private-to-folks-on-the-server feed.
    Mentions: you can @-mention anyone on the server to get a post into their home feed.
    Public posts: by default, every post is private. If a user checks a box, the post will be made public, so folks that are not logged in can see it.
    Posts in the feeds section, circles section, or home section can be replied to, with the user choosing where to share (a circle, or their feed)
    It's all a single-file Python script that can run in either CGI mode or server mode. I compile it with nuitka and run it as a CGI behind Apache. Very old school, works fine. Non-attachment data stored in sqlite, so if you have the DB, you can fire up a copy of the site, sans attachments.
    Attachments: gallery posts supported, with lightbox viewing. PDFs supported. Nothing else right now.
    Works on mobile.
    No email or other form of notifications. If users visit, they see stuff. If they don't, they don't.
    Super-opinionated: admin controls everything, and password resets go through the admin, who simply asks the server to regenerate a new password, that the admin then passes along to the user.
    There are no direct messages, or private posts, in the sense that if you log in, you'll be able to see everything going on if you click through to it.
    Replies, comments, and reactions are supported. Conversation view (tree of posts replying to each other) is supported.
    

Those are the features off the top of my head. It's a social network for small groups that are high-trust. If I open source it (after I feel it is more airtight) I'll probably ask AI to provide a landing page using this as a prompt and provide this verbatim at the top of that page for folks that want the zero-bullshit version. =)

Agree on this and it’s the architecture that backs our orchestration platform called https://unmeshed.io

[dead]

It's complexity you already have. You need some sort of HA for your app server and some sort of resilient storage for your database server. Using sqlite just means the storage is used by the app server directly, nothing more.

The thing that people forget about databases is that they are just really complicated ways of writing to a file.

The crux of all these “you only need sqlite” posts isn’t that you need SQLite, it’s that your architecture only ever needed flat appendable log file to begin with.

Once you realise that SQLite is just an aggregated view over this log it calls into question if you needed a third party query engine at all, suddenly the whole NoSQL vs SQL debate becomes a meaningless implementation detail.

Server based databases aren’t special beyond the fact they’re just distributed synchronisation primitives over files on a file system. But the utility of this is quite limited in practice, writing to a table will always require some sort of synchronisation, using SQLite vs Postgres is just a case of where you put the lock - in your own code or in a 3rd party server.