Running WriteFreely at a shared web hosting plan

WriteFreely Installation
,
1

Hello,

I’m on a shared hosting plan with OVH, which offers SSH access and an SQL database. I am not a root user.
I installed WriteFreely 0.16.0 at the subdomain folder blog, with the following configuration:

root
   -blog (subdomain)
      - writefreely
         - temps
         - config.ini
         ...
   - www 

Server setup 
Production, standalone
Secure (port 443), auto certificate

Database setup 
MySQL
✔ Username: █
✔ Password: █
✔ Database name: █
Host: databasename.mysql.db
Port: 3306

✔ Port: 3306
Single user blog
Blog name: Super Blog
Public URL: http://blog.mysite.com
Enabled
Private
Private

It worked fine, WriteFreely had been successfully configured and installed. I then set the key using ./writefreely config generate.

When I ran ./writefreely , I received the following output at my terminal:

2025/09/09 17:07:10 Starting WriteFreely 0.16.0...
2025/09/09 17:07:10 Loading config.ini configuration...
2025/09/09 17:07:10 Loading templates...
2025/09/09 17:07:10 Loading pages...
2025/09/09 17:07:10 Loading user pages...
2025/09/09 17:07:10 Loading encryption keys...
2025/09/09 17:07:10 Connecting to MySQL database...
2025/09/09 17:07:10 Connected to database.
2025/09/09 17:07:10 Database version: 8.4.5-5
2025/09/09 17:07:10 [jobs] Not starting publish jobs queue: no email provider is configured.
2025/09/09 17:07:10 Adding {domain} routes (single user)...
2025/09/09 17:07:10 Going to serve...
2025/09/09 17:07:10 Using autocert on host blog.domainname.com
2025/09/09 17:07:10 Serving on https://localhost:443
2025/09/09 17:07:10 ---
2025/09/09 17:07:10 Serving redirects on http://localhost:80
ERROR: 2025/09/09 17:07:10 app.go:506: Unable to start redirect server: listen tcp :80: bind: permission denied

Can someone help me? Thank you very much.

2

Port 80 is privileged, so if WriteFreely isn’t running with root-level privileges (or you haven’t otherwise given writefreely permission to bind to these ports), then you’ll run into a message like this.

It looks like it started fine on port 443 (for HTTPS), so if you’re fine without the redirect from HTTP to HTTPS, your site should still work fine. Otherwise, are you able to get root access? Then you can give WriteFreely access to this port, perhaps following advice like this: