Ghost

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Build me the publication I actually need instead of a hosted Ghost: posts, a newsletter, and paid memberships, on my own machine.

Read this first: Ghost itself is open source and self-hosting it is a real answer — the fee buys hosting, updates, a CDN and a warmed sending account. Build this when you want the publication to be exactly yours, and read the deliverability section twice, because that is the part that is genuinely hard.

STACK
- Astro with a Node adapter, or Fastify with server-rendered templates
- SQLite through better-sqlite3, WAL mode, with FTS5 for search
- SMTP through a provider set in .env
- Caddy in front

THE DATA MODEL
- posts: id, slug, title, excerpt, body_md, body_html, feature_image, status, visibility, published_at, updated_at, author_id, tags_json, canonical_url, meta_json — visibility is public, members-only or paid
- post_revisions: id, post_id, body_md, author_id, at
- members: id, email, name, status, tier_id, stripe_customer_id, subscribed_to_newsletter, labels_json, created_at, last_seen_at
- subscriptions: id, member_id, tier_id, external_id, status, current_period_end, cancel_at, amount_cents, currency
- tiers: id, name, monthly_cents, yearly_cents, benefits_json, is_active
- newsletters: id, post_id, subject, sent_at, segment_json, recipient_count
- deliveries: id, newsletter_id, member_id, sent_at, opened_at, clicked_at, bounced_at, complained_at
- magic_tokens: id, member_id, token_hash, kind, expires_at, used_at
- Every send recorded per member, so nobody is mailed twice and a resume after a crash is exact

WRITING AND PUBLISHING
- Markdown with a live preview, images uploaded locally and resized to a set of widths with the dimensions stored
- Draft, scheduled and published, with a worker that publishes on time and is idempotent
- Revisions kept for every save
- A permanent slug from the first publish; changing it writes a redirect rather than breaking every link that exists
- Tags with their own pages, an author page, and pagination

THE SITE
- Server-rendered HTML, no client-side framework, under 100KB for an article
- Open Graph tags and a share image generated at build or on demand with satori and resvg
- JSON-LD: Article with its author and dates, and BreadcrumbList
- RSS with full content, a sitemap, canonical URLs, and a 301 for every changed slug
- Full-text search over posts with FTS5, server-side, instant
- Dark and light, one accent, a self-hosted variable font as WOFF2 and never one from a third-party CDN

MEMBERSHIP WITHOUT PASSWORDS
- Sign-in by magic link only. No passwords for readers — nobody wants another one, and there is nothing here worth the risk of storing them
- Tokens single-use, expiring, compared in constant time, and invalidated on use
- A session cookie that is httpOnly, secure and sameSite lax
- The member's own page shows their tier, their billing and a way to leave that takes two clicks

PAID TIERS
- The payment processor holds the card; this application never sees one
- Checkout hosted by the processor, webhooks consumed with signature verification, idempotency by event id and out-of-order delivery handled
- The local subscription state is a mirror. Reconcile nightly against the processor and alert on disagreement
- Access checked on the server for every members-only and paid post. Content gating done in the browser is not gating
- Failed payments retried by the processor, with your own emails alongside and a card-update link that needs no login

THE NEWSLETTER
- A published post can be sent to a segment: everyone, free members, paid members, a label
- HTML built with tables and inline styles because that is what mail clients render, plus a plain-text alternative generated from the same source
- A test send to yourself first, always, and the interface refuses to send without one
- Batched, rate-limited to what the provider accepts, resumable, and idempotent per member
- Every mail carries a one-click unsubscribe that needs no login, and the List-Unsubscribe headers

DELIVERABILITY, THE HARD PART
- SPF, DKIM and DMARC on your sending domain, with the records written out in the README
- A dedicated subdomain for sending, warmed slowly — a new domain sending two thousand messages on day one goes straight to spam and stays there
- Bounces and complaints consumed from the provider's webhook: a hard bounce unsubscribes, a complaint unsubscribes permanently
- Watch the complaint rate; above a fraction of a percent the provider will suspend you
- This is what the hosted fee is really buying, and it is worth saying so honestly

OPERATIONS
- .env: DATABASE_PATH, STORAGE_PATH, BASE_URL, SMTP_URL, FROM_ADDRESS, SESSION_SECRET, STRIPE_KEY, STRIPE_WEBHOOK_SECRET, HASH_SALT
- Migrations on boot, each once
- Nightly backup off the machine, restore script — this holds your subscriber list and your revenue, and an untested backup is not a backup
- Health endpoint checking the database, mail and the processor

WHAT MATTERS MOST
The send path and the access check. Build idempotent per-member delivery and server-side gating first, then send to yourself, to a colleague and to a free address at three different providers and see where each lands. A publication that mails somebody twice, or that leaks a paid post, loses the reader either way.

Give me the repository, migrations, .env.example, a seed with posts and members, and a README with deploy steps behind Caddy, the DNS records, and a warm-up schedule.