Shaarli – Personal, minimalist, database-free, bookmarking service

https://github.com/shaarli/Shaarli

by dsr_ • 10 years ago

98 53 10 years ago

github.com

cocktailpeanuts• 10 years ago

Would be nice to hear how this is database-free. Is it a static site generator? Is it using files?

gmisra• 10 years ago

FTA:

  links are stored in a file
    - compact storage
    - no database required
    - easy backup: simply copy the datastore file

Retr0spectrum3• 10 years ago

That's still a database if you ask me. Just a different type.

bigbugbag8• 10 years ago

Why not use a real database ? Files are slow !

Do browsing this page feel slow ? Try browsing older pages, too.

It's not slow at all, is it ? And don't forget the database contains more than 16000 links, and it's on a shared host, with 32000 visitors/day for my website alone. And it's still damn fast. Why ?

The data file is only 3.7 Mb. It's read 99% of the time, and is probably already in the operation system disk cache. So generating a page involves no I/O at all most of the time.

http://sebsauvage.net/wiki/doku.php?id=php:shaarli#why_not_u...

campuscodi• 10 years ago

This must be the 3rd time I see this on HN in the last 5-6 years.

Retr0spectrum3• 10 years ago

Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9755366

midgetjones• 10 years ago

yes, these constant reposts must stop!

threepipeproblm• 10 years ago

I love the name.

luckman212• 10 years ago

Neat, but I'll stick with Pinboard. It's basically perfect.

idlewords3• 10 years ago

I don't know, I'm tempted to switch to this thing.

dsr_2• 10 years ago

You'll probably need a beefier backend and an authentication service, to serve your existing customer base.

azeirah• 10 years ago

Hey Maciej, just wondering. Does having this link on the HN frontpage influence the amount of new subscribers you have today, and possibly tomorrow? Just curious

urza4• 10 years ago

Pinboard is SaaS, Shaarli is self-hosted and open-source. For some people it matters.

bigbugbag8• 10 years ago

It's far from perfect, for instance how do I access my bookmarks while offline ?

from the original shaarli FAQ:

What use Shaarli and not Delicious/Diigo ?

With Shaarli:

    The data is yours: It's hosted on your server.
    Never fear of having your data locked-in.
    Never fear to have your data sold to third party.
    Your private links are not hosted on a third party server.
    You are not tracked by browser addons (like Diigo does)
    You can change the look and feel of the pages if you want.
    You can change the behaviour of the program.
    It's magnitude faster than most bookmarking services.

jwebb99• 10 years ago

Strange. A few days ago, I announced my bookmarking service (http://paperbin.co) and it was barely noticed. Yet, Shaarli has 32 votes within an hour.

NetStrikeForce• 10 years ago

Yours seems to be a SaaS and Shaarli seems to be an open source product you can self host.

That might be why this one caught more interest.

dsr_2• 10 years ago

Self-hosted open source projects tend to appeal to a different set of people than a commercial competitor to an established service.

Also, HN is weird.

bigbugbag8• 10 years ago

I'm a long time shaarli user and the reason I use shaarli is to get away from services such as yours. I trusted del.icio.us got bitten and will never make the same mistake again.

paperbin.co is useless and pointless to me, it is contrary to how the internet and the web is supposed to work, it is closed source crippleware with no possibility to self host, it offers no features that has not been around in competitors for years.

This is a reason why I ignore your project but am excited to participate in discussion about shaarli and wallabag.

randomsofr2• 10 years ago

The ui looks old.

hisyam• 10 years ago

Yeah, and it doesn't exactly look minimalist either.

mulle_nat• 10 years ago

Yeah 30K lines of code in about 100 files is a strange use of the term minimalist.

stymaar3• 10 years ago

It is ! Shaarli bas been created in 2011 and the UI hasn't evolved since then. There is currently a work in progress in that direction though.

randomsofr2• 10 years ago

That looks old even for 2011 :P

bigbugbag8• 10 years ago

Use CSS to change the look if it does not suit you.

ge962• 10 years ago

Question: how does it store data without a database. or does it not store data?

gragas• 10 years ago

Think about it this way: what does a filesystem do?

stymaar3• 10 years ago

The "datastore" is a gzip+base64-encoded serialized PHP object written to a file.

It's really efficient under shaarli's typical workload : really few writes ans a lot of read => almost no IO, everything stays in the filesystem's cache.

ge962• 10 years ago

Oh yeah that makes sense, I was thinking there is browser storage but probably not when you turn off the browser/computer.

bigbugbag8• 10 years ago

It stores data, it can do so without requiring a database engine. As in flat file database.

Mao_Zedang• 10 years ago

Be nice to see something that uses cloud storage like Azure table storage, but run locally so at least I have a backup. Also that log is horrendous, but hey its free!

mxuribe• 10 years ago

Can anyone comment on shaarli vs wallabag?

Wallabag seems designed to mimic Pocket more - but I'm only basing this on a quick glance. Can anyone cite any pros/cons of each platform? For example is one better to host on a smaller vps? (My use-case is really minimal, just personal bookmarking, not a team or anything like that.)

nerdponx• 10 years ago

Came to ask the same question.

Gmo• 10 years ago

I don't know about Shaarli, but yes, Wallabag is a read it later service, not a bookmarking one.

You can self-host or use a hosted version here (that's what I do) : https://framabag.org/

urza4• 10 years ago

Shaarli was created as self-hosted alternative to del.icio.us back in the day..

bigbugbag8• 10 years ago

I've been using both for a while.

Shaarli is a tool to bookmark, tag, comment, publish on links you want to keep.

Wallabag is a tool to save content to read later, it makes a local copy of the relevant content which it displays with usually improved readability and save content from linkrot, once read you can either save it, push it to your shaarli or delete it.

I chose to self host both on a shared webserver and they require very little effort for installation and maintenance. Some link are not wallabag friendly and once in a while it will fail to retrieve content, there's a button to report the link to wallabag dev so they can improve the situation and a button to go to the original link destination.

I never used pocket, this is a third party closed source service which is the opposite way of how internet is supposed to be done.

If you cannot afford or do not want a shared hosting, you can host this locally in a virtual machine.

treve• 10 years ago

A file is still a database, it's often simply a worse one. Go with sqlite instead of generating PHP files for storage.

stephane-klein• 10 years ago

I did that: https://github.com/harobed/gobookmark

« Inspired by Shaarli (Delicious clone), easier to install (only one standalone executable).

Built with Go - GoBookmark runs without installation on multiple platforms. »

bigbugbag8• 10 years ago

http://sebsauvage.net/wiki/doku.php?id=php:shaarli#why_not_u...

mastre_• 10 years ago

Going with something like sqlite is not always better -- if what it provides is not needed, it's complexity for complexity's sake. PHP arrays are perfectly fine (until you reach a certain size), particularly when using a direct key access scheme. Loading/saving the data is pretty much a file_get_contents|file_put_contents affair, with some inline filters such as serialize & gzip. Couldn't be simpler, and it sounds like it doesn't need to be more complex than that.

an_fnk• 10 years ago

There is also a nice OSS iOS extension, ShaarliOS https://github.com/mro/ShaarliOS

urza4• 10 years ago

And for Android there is https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.dimtion.sh...

urza4• 10 years ago

I switched to shaarli back in the days when del.icio.us was bought by yahoo. I am using it ever since without problem. Hosting on super cheap PHP hosting. The open-source community took over the project from original author and they are maintaining it. Highly recommend.

subbz• 10 years ago

Same here, it's simply working!

MrPatan• 10 years ago

If it holds data it's a database.

Shaarli – Personal, minimalist, database-free, bookmarking service

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