Online install — Debian / Ubuntu

Prerequisites

A Debian or Ubuntu host with sudo or root access. The installer handles everything else — Perl, SQLite, all nine production dependencies — via apt. Supported on Debian 11+ and Ubuntu 20.04+.

Run the installer

Pick an instance name — a short alphanumeric label used in the service name and install path. 1 is fine for a single install:

curl -fsSL https://www.chinaski.net/install.sh | sudo bash -s -- 1

To install to a custom directory or port:

curl -fsSL https://www.chinaski.net/install.sh \
  | sudo bash -s -- prod --dir /srv/chinaski --port 3001

The installer prints each step as it runs. On success it prints the install path, service name, and listen address.

What gets installed

• Code — extracted to /var/www/chinaski1/ (or your --dir)
• Database — SQLite at /var/www/chinaski1/chinaski.db, initialised from schema.sql
• Env file — /etc/chinaski1/env with a generated secret and listen URL
• Service — chinaski@1.service enabled and started via systemd
• Backup timer — chinaski-backup@1.timer runs daily at 03:17
• Output dir — /var/www/chinaski1/output/ where the built static site lands

Verify the service

systemctl status chinaski@1
journalctl -u chinaski@1 -n 20

The daemon binds to 127.0.0.1:3001 by default — loopback only by design. Put a reverse proxy in front of it.

Configure your web server

Ready-to-use config examples ship in deploy/:

• deploy/chinaski.nginx.conf.example — nginx vhosts with /forms/ proxy for form blocks
• deploy/chinaski.Caddyfile.example — Caddy equivalent

The admin domain proxies all requests to the daemon. Public language vhosts serve static files from output/{lang}/ and only proxy /forms/.

Log in and run the first build

Open your admin domain in a browser and log in. Go to Build → Run build. Chinaski renders all published pages and posts to /var/www/chinaski1/output/. Point your public vhost at output/en/ (or output/ for single-language sites) and your site is live.

Offline install — any Linux

When to use this

Use the offline path when your target machine is air-gapped or has no reliable internet during setup, you're on a non-Debian Linux (Alpine, Arch, RHEL, etc.), or you want to pre-download everything on a fast machine and transfer it to slower hardware.

Prerequisites

The bundle compiles XS modules on the target machine. You need: gcc or clang, make, perl 5.26+, sqlite3, openssl, and image library headers.

# Debian / Ubuntu
apt-get install -y make gcc sqlite3 openssl libjpeg-dev libpng-dev libgif-dev

# Alpine
apk add make gcc sqlite openssl libjpeg-turbo-dev libpng-dev giflib-dev

One-liner

curl -fsSL https://www.chinaski.net/install.sh \
  | sudo bash -s -- --offline --prefix /srv/chinaski

Download, verify, and run manually

# Download the bundle and its checksum
curl -O https://www.chinaski.net/dist/chinaski-latest.tar.gz
curl -O https://www.chinaski.net/dist/chinaski-latest.tar.gz.sha256

# Verify before running
sha256sum -c chinaski-latest.tar.gz.sha256

# Extract and install
tar -xzf chinaski-latest.tar.gz
cd chinaski-latest
sudo bash install.sh --prefix /srv/chinaski

Seed the site URL during install

sudo bash install.sh \
  --prefix /srv/chinaski \
  --site-url https://example.com

This writes the value into the SQLite settings table. It can also be changed later from Admin → Settings.