homebooru

A booru-style image board focused on simple data storage (no databases or other additional services, just files).

Installation

I created an install script to automatically install everything. It fetches the current GitHub release (alternatively you can modify it to use a local release archive) and

• creates a user and group with which the backend runs
• install the backend to /opt/homebooru
• install the frontend to /srv/www/homebooru
• save posts etc. in /mnt
• set up nginx as the webserver
• set up and start a systemd service to run the backend server

This script was mainly created for use in a LXC container in Proxmox (with another disk mounted to /mnt).

Just download the script and run it as root:

wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Danksa/homebooru/refs/heads/main/install
chmod u+x install
./install

You can also modify it before running to change some directories, if needed.

Note

The system is required to have npm, nodejs, nginx, wget, tar, ffmpeg and imagemagick installed already I've tested this with ffmpeg version 7.1.1 and imagemagick version 7.1.1, older versions probably work as well.

Updating

The update script will update your homebooru by:

• detecting the user and group to use from the owner of the backend directory (/opt/homebooru by default)
• downloading the latest GitHub release
• updating the backend and frontend files
• transferring the settings of your old frontend config.js to the new one. (a copy of your old config will be created as config.js.bak, if anything goes wrong)
• restarting the backend

To update your homebooru you can use the update script pretty much like you use the install script:

wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Danksa/homebooru/refs/heads/main/update
chmod u+x update
./update

if you use non-default directories for your frontend or backend, supply them as environment variables:

wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Danksa/homebooru/refs/heads/main/update
chmod u+x update
FRONTEND_DIR="/srv/somewhere" BACKEND_DIR="/usr/local/somewhere" ./update

Features

• Uploading images and videos (now with progress bars!)
• Importing images and videos from a local server directory
• Tagging posts
• Searching for posts by which tags they have (or don't have)
• Display posts (obviously!)
• Mass-tagging posts
• Tag categories
• Slideshows
• Navigating to next/previous post

Planned

• Tag aliases
• Tag merging
• Tag implications

Currently not Planned

• Duplicate detection
• Uploading files directly from other sites
• Automatic AI-based tagging

Development

To start the development build just clone this directory, install the backend dependencies via npm:

npm install

and symlink the backend/data directory for the frontend:

ln -s ../backend/data ./frontend/data

Afterwards you can simply run npm run start to start the backend. For the frontend you'll need some webserver, like http-server.

Then open http://localhost/ and you should be good to go!

Updating the version

You can run the version script with the parameter major, minor or patch to update the version. This will automatically update the VERSION variable in the install and update script.

For example: ./version minor

Creating a Release Archive

To build an archive to later install using the install script simply run the build command. It will extract the version from the backend package.json and create an archive named homebooru-v<VERSION>.tar.gz inside the package folder.

How does it work?

This project consists of two components:

• A backend written in Typescript, running in NodeJS (I know, I'm sorry)
• A static frontend written in plain HTML/CSS/JS, which can be hosted by a webserver of your choice

For more details, check out the frontend readme and backend readme.

Disclaimer

The logo was created using the fonts Dancing Script and Noto Sans.