Freedium: Your paywall breakthrough for Medium!

Stack:

• Backend:
  • language: Python 3.9+
  • framework: Unicorn, FastAPI
• Frontend:
  • framework: Tailwinds CSS v3, Jinja2
  • monitoring: Sentry
• Database:
  • PostgreSQL, Dragonfly (Redis and Memcached compatible key-value database)
• Utils:
  • Caddy, Docker, Docker Compose, Cloudflare WARP proxy (wgcf)

Project configuration:

There is three (3) docker-compose profiles:

• min - without 2 Cluster of Cloudflare WARP proxy, HAProxy proxy balancer, Plausible, Grafana.
• local - based on min, but with freedium.local exposed hostname, both 80 and 443 ports are exposed, with self-signed TLS certificate.
• prod - with all services for production.

Requirements:

• Docker, Docker Compose, last version is preferred.
• Linux, preferably rolling release. We can't guarantee that Freedium instance will work on other OS. Tested on Ubuntu 22.04 and Fedora 39.
• git
• Preferably, fresh and clean brain.

Local run:

To configure your Freedium instance, follow these steps:

1. Clone the repository:

   git clone https://codeberg.org/Freedium-cfd/web/ ./freedium-web --depth 1
   cd ./freedium-web
   

2. Create and configure the environment file:

   cp .env_template .env
   

   Open the .env file and adjust the values as needed for your setup.

3. Set up the Docker network:

   sudo docker network create caddy_net
   

4. (Optional) Change your hosts file:

   sudo nano /etc/hosts
   # or
   vim /etc/hosts
   # and when you are closed vim, type `:w !sudo tee %` to save file without executing vim in root mode
   

   Add the following line:

   127.0.0.1 freedium.local
   

5. Start the Freedium services (min profile):

   sudo docker compose --profile local -f ./docker-compose/docker-compose.yml up
   

   Stopping the services:

   sudo docker compose --profile local -f ./docker-compose/docker-compose.yml down
   

And now you can access local instance of Freedium by opening browser and type https://freedium.local or http://localhost:6752 if you ignored 4th step. There is would be a warning about insecure connection, because we use self-signed TLS certificate. Ignore it.

Production run:

All production services are running on prod profile. If you use Dockerized reverse proxy, you can specify network caddy_freedium_net with external: true option in networks section of your reverse proxy container. Specify caddy_freedium hostname with port 6752 (or 6753 for Plausible) in your reverse proxy configuration.

As alternative, you can directly change docker-compose configurations to use your reverse proxy. See docker-compose and caddy folders for more details.

Roadmap

• Speed up parser logic
• Parse articles directly to Markdown
• Add more services than just a Medium
• Rewrite frontend to Svelte
• Integrate Grafana/Prometheus/Plausible to monitor our services
• Translate posts to different languages using translatepy library
• AI-powered summary of posts