Runs on E-Waste
Light enough for a salvaged laptop
Chinaski runs comfortably on hardware most software has abandoned — a ten-year-old ThinkPad, a Raspberry Pi, a bottom-tier VPS. Publishing a website shouldn't require a new data center.
View on GitHubPowerful enough for production
Runs on a Raspberry Pi
Chinaski's memory footprint fits comfortably within 256 MB. The admin interface, SQLite database, and build system run on a Raspberry Pi 3 without modification.
Works on a bottom-tier VPS
The cheapest cloud instances — 512 MB RAM, shared CPU — are more than enough for Chinaski in production. You don't need a $50/month server to run a professional website.
No build tools at runtime
There is no webpack, no bundler, no transpiler running in production. The build happens once, offline. What's deployed is the output, not the pipeline.
Why it stays light
No Node.js, no npm
Node and npm are absent from the Chinaski stack. There is no node_modules directory consuming gigabytes of disk, no package-lock.json to audit, and no npm process consuming memory at runtime.
SQLite keeps it simple
A full database server like MySQL or Postgres requires a persistent process, memory allocation, and configuration. SQLite is a library — no server, no process, no memory overhead beyond the library itself.
Static output multiplies your hardware
A site built into static files can be served from the same low-power machine that runs the admin, or synced to any CDN. One Raspberry Pi can serve millions of requests if the files are cached at the edge.
The environmental case
Reusing hardware you already own instead of provisioning new cloud instances is the lowest-carbon option for hosting a website. Software that runs on e-waste keeps that hardware out of landfill for longer.
Put old hardware to work
Complete setup, theming, and API documentation lives at docs.chinaski.net.
Read the documentation