Requirements
What it takes to run Chinaski
Chinaski is deliberately light. If you have a Debian-stable machine and a few hundred megabytes free, you can run it — production hardware optional.
View on GitHubMinimum requirements
A Linux host
Chinaski runs on any Debian-stable machine — a VPS, a home server, or a repurposed laptop. Ubuntu LTS and Raspberry Pi OS also work. macOS is supported for development.
Perl 5.20 or later
Perl ships with every Debian installation. No download, no version manager, no PATH configuration. Nine CPAN dependencies install in under a minute from Debian packages.
256 MB RAM minimum
Chinaski runs comfortably within the memory budget of the cheapest cloud instances and decade-old hardware. A build of a hundred pages uses less than 50 MB of RAM at peak.
Details
Full dependency list
Nine production dependencies, all in Debian stable: libplack-perl, libdbi-perl, libdbd-sqlite3-perl, libtemplate-perl, libjson-perl, libdigest-sha-perl, libmime-lite-perl, libyaml-perl, and nginx. Install them all with one apt command.
Database
Chinaski uses SQLite for its content store. There is no database server to install, configure, or back up separately. The entire site database is a single file you can copy with cp.
Disk space
The application itself requires under 20 MB. A typical site with hundreds of pages and posts, including media uploads, fits comfortably in under 1 GB. Static output for a 200-page site is typically under 10 MB of HTML.
Network and ports
The admin interface runs on a configurable port (default 5000) behind nginx. The production site is pure static files — no port, no process, just files on disk served by nginx or any web server.
Full installation guide
Complete setup, theming, and API documentation lives at docs.chinaski.net.
Read the documentation