Self-hosting

HushJournal is an end-to-end encrypted open-source journl web app, it is meant to be self-hosted. There are multiple ways to self-host it from using Docker image to running compiled binary.

Docker
Docker Compose With Postgres
Pre-built Binaries
Build from source

Docker

We provide docker image for HushJournal on docker hub, you can use that to create and run the container for the HushJournal.

docker run -d --name hushjournal \
    -e DATABASE_URL="postgres://<user>:<password>@<host>:5432/<db>" \
    -e APP_ORIGIN="http://127.0.0.1:8000" \
    -p 8000:8000 \
    thevivekshukla/hushjournal:latest

Docker Compose With Postgres

You can use docker compose to run both Postgres server and HushJournal together.

services:
  db:
    image: postgres:18
    environment:
      TZ: UTC
      PGTZ: UTC
      POSTGRES_USER: hushjournal
      POSTGRES_PASSWORD: hushjournal
      POSTGRES_DB: hushjournal
    command: ["postgres", "-c", "timezone=UTC"]
    volumes:
      - hushjournal_postgres:/var/lib/postgresql
    healthcheck:
      test: ["CMD-SHELL", "pg_isready -U hushjournal -d hushjournal"]
      interval: 5s
      timeout: 5s
      retries: 5

  hushjournal:
    image: thevivekshukla/hushjournal:latest
    depends_on:
      db:
        condition: service_healthy
    environment:
      DATABASE_URL: postgres://hushjournal:hushjournal@db:5432/hushjournal
      APP_ORIGIN: http://127.0.0.1:8000
    ports:
      - "8000:8000"

volumes:
  hushjournal_postgres:

Pre-built Binaries

We offer pre-built binaries for various architectures and operating systems, you can get the binary from our release page.

Check out this blog post on Deploying HushJournal Binary On A Linux VPS.

Build From Source

Pre-requisites:

Run below command to build release binary with frontend build files embedded in it:

git clone git@github.com:thevivekshukla/hushjournal.git
cd hushjournal
just build