Show HN: Pbnj – A minimal, self-hosted pastebin you can deploy in 60 seconds (opens in new tab)

People don't usually expose self-hosted services directly to the internet, even if they have a login page. You use a reverse proxy, that way they can be HTTPS, share port 443, and use subdomains (Caddy makes this really easy). And then adding auth becomes trivial, and you can even put your services behind some SSO sign-in if you want to.

If possible though it's best to use a VPN so that nothing needs to be accessible from the internet at all (not to mention then you can access your NAS shares w/o needing a web UI). That's why I actually prefer when self-hosted apps don't have their own auth system, or at least let me disable it. If everything's internal only, I don't need it anyway.

Usually, for these kind of programs, I put them behind a proxy with basic auth.

Also, when I tried to add something on the demo site, it asked me for an auth key.

Looking at the code, the package.json file has an entry for AUTH_KEY (in the Cloudflare config) to prevent random people from pasting stuff.

I'm planning to set up a VPN into my home network for stuff like this. Services, NAS, etc. that I want remote access to but don't want exposed to the deep dark ocean of the internet.

Hey!

Right now, some things are somewhat hard-coded to be Cloudflare compatible. If someone's willing, you can just deploy this without Cloudflare, but you'd need to dig into the code a little.

In the future releases, I'll make it possible to host it on VPCs and release a Dockerfile along with it, so that should help a little.

Thanks for checking the project out!

I use CloudFlare a lot for "self hosting" .. but I also run an old pi from home with Bun in place of workers. Suprisingly compatible and low lift.

Not exactly "without CloudFlare", but for true compat you can probably also self host workerd itself which is open source: github.com/cloudflare/workerd

pnpm run build

should do it

Crazy that people really need instructions on how to self-host stuff these days... this stuff used to be something most devs could figure out.

Yes, that's quite fair re:Cloudflare!

I couldn't find the right words to describe this, in comparison to something like Github Gist. I suppose "Own-your-data" since the D1 db generated is yours completely.

Happy to change the branding to be more reflective of this!