Ah, I see. Could you try it again whenever you have a chance, and let me know what the last message is where it hangs?
You said you used Digital Ocean, any other hosting providers that can be suitable for this purpose? I am also not great at understanding how this stuff works but sometimes, the plans of Digital Ocean are a little to much when converted to Indian rupees. Please let me know, if you have any more suitable alternatives.
I don’t use Digital Ocean - just their online Guides, which I have found useful. Other providers I know are Linode, Vultr - who I have used in the past, and Amazon Web Services (AWS) who I use currently. AWS has a Free Tier for the first 12 months on some of its services. Works out at only a few USD per month.
Will do.
AWS EC2 Instance. Clean install with Ubuntu 18.04 LTS.
Clean install of Nginx
sudo apt update
sudo apt upgrade
Writefreely uploaded via FileZilla.
Here is a copy and paste of the terminal:
./writefreely --config
No config.ini configuration yet. Creating new.
✍ Write Freely Configuration ✍
This quick configuration process will generate the application's config
file, config.ini.
It validates your input along the way, so you can be sure any future
errors aren't caused by a bad configuration. If you'd rather configure your
server manually, instead run: writefreely --create-config and edit that
file.
Server setup
Production, behind reverse proxy
Local port: 8080
Database setup
SQLite
Filename: writefreely.db
App setup
Single user blog
Admin username: *******
Admin password: *******
Blog name: test
Public URL: http://*************
Enabled
Private
Private
2019/01/08 10:39:23 Connecting to sqlite3 database...
2019/01/08 10:39:23 Creating user *******...
Following command shows nothing related to WriteFreely:
tail -f /var/log/syslog
If you can suggest other avenues, I’m happy to leave this server set as is and test further.
Thanks, that helps. So it does look like that was the issue we recently fixed – you shouldn’t see it anymore in v0.7.
I just tried again with v0.7 and all is good except:
ERROR: 2019/01/08 18:55:27 log.go:26: Rolling back users INSERT: no such table: users
ERROR: 2019/01/08 18:55:27 log.go:26: Unable to create user: no such table: users
Solved by running:
./writefreely --init-db
before
./writefreely --config
So you might want to make that adjustment in the Getting Started info… 
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Yes, I too got the same error and fixed it in the exact same manner, even in my localhost.
Actually, having tried again. You cannot run
init-db
before
config
I tried that route just now. So had to run config then init-db and then run config a second time…
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Yes. Correct. Forgot to mention that.
I just added a bug for the --init-db --config issue, but now I see it is a known issue and addressed in 0.7.1. I’ll remove my Githib bug.
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@lhl hey this guide you gave is really helpful. I plan to start on Scaleway but have you tried with the secure option yet? Do you know how to do it? I know one thing that we have to use 443 but apart from that what all procedures from Let’s Encrypt? Details please if you have done it.
Cheers, am just a bloke on the street with no documented experience, just personal trial and error…
I have a https version of my blog now. I used the following to set up:
It’s part of Let’s Encrypt - really easy to follow, you’ll need to be able to SSH to your server.
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@lhl BTW, I heard that the free tier on Amazon EC2 runs out quickly. How many months have you been running your blog? If you are paying already then what is the cost. I need to be sure before I jump anywhere.
When I was using Bitbucket and an S3 instance where there is a lot of upload each time (I was using a HUGO Static Generated site at the time) my monthly costs were around $5 - $8 over the FREE allowance - roughly updating on a daily basis.
Now I am using WriteFreely, still updating once every few days or so, single user - based on a AWS EC2 instance, also using AWS Route53 to register my domain my monthly costs are approx $1.50.
For my usage it is less than when I was using VULTR to host my sites. A lot will depend on your usage environment.
One of the reasons I switched from HUGO to WriteFreely was the ease of administration. I still wanted a bare-bones blog with very few, if any, bells & whistles. I also wanted to really restrict the outgoing costs to the absolute minimum for a personal use only site that I have control over.
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So, if I use Scaleway’s basic tier that costs around €1.99/mo (about $2.26) with 25GB SSD & 1 GB Memory but it has a minified version of Ubuntu 16.04, would you recommend me that?
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I would think that there is not a lot of difference in most of the offers out there at this level of requirements. So long as you are not locking yourself into a minimum term contract - you can pretty much switch a VPS on/off as you please.
There is some effort required in backing-up files and db’s etc but it is always fairly easy to move from one provider to another if you find it doesn’t suit you.
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