A bold, immersive travel journal. Sojourn is a self-hostable blog/journal for documenting your travels — full-bleed hero imagery, interactive maps with route lines, photo galleries with a lightbox, reactions, comments, and full-text search. It's built to feel like a magazine and run like a single, portable container.
Four invented journeys, eighteen entries, real routes on real roads. No sign-up: press “Explore the demo” on the admin login and you're inside the editor — every screen, with the content already there.
The demo is read-only, so it stays as the last person found it. Everything else works: browse the maps and galleries, react to an entry, vote in a poll.
Where this is: v0.1. I run it for my own journal and it works, but it is young. Expect schema churn between releases (migrations apply themselves, so that mostly means "redeploy"), expect rough edges away from the paths I use daily, and read the release notes before updating. Issues and PRs welcome.
- Immersive home / hero with cinematic layout and motion.
- Post pages with photo gallery + lightbox and scroll-driven story maps.
- Interactive trip maps (MapLibre GL, keyless via OpenFreeMap) with pins, route lines, and a full-screen journey explorer.
- GPX tracks with distance + elevation profiles.
- Reactions — heart, fire, wow, star.
- Comments with replies, likes, and an admin moderation surface.
- Interactive blocks — inline polls and quizzes inside posts.
- Full-text search across posts.
/tripsand/mapindex views.- Admin dashboard (
/admin) — create/edit trips & posts, a rich editor, direct photo upload (with EXIF/GPS extraction), and per-trip collaborators. - AI authoring (optional) — staged drafting pipeline, photo enrichment/captioning, with a token-cost meter.
- Internationalization — German default with a DE/EN switcher across the whole UI.
- Web Push notifications for the admin and subscribers.
- Installable PWA — offline caching of visited pages and assets, add-to-home-screen.
- Portable by design — Dockerized, no vendor lock-in.
Entries pair the writing with a map that follows along as you read.
Every trip also opens as a route you can walk through, stop by stop.
Sojourn needs one thing to run: Supabase (Postgres + Auth + Storage) — either your own or theirs. Everything beyond that — web push, AI authoring, semantic search, photo vision — is optional and switches on when you add the relevant key. Nothing is locked to a single cloud vendor.
There are three ways to run it. They differ only in who looks after the database:
| Pick this if | What it costs you | |
|---|---|---|
| All-in-one | you want a blog and would rather not think about the rest | one host, ~1 GB of RAM, no accounts anywhere |
| Vercel + hosted Supabase | you'd rather not run a server at all | two free-tier accounts, a deploy button |
| Docker + your own Supabase | you already have a Postgres/Supabase you like | one container, ~1 GB of RAM |
The shortest of the three, in full — no checkout, just Docker. Make a directory for it, then mint this instance's secrets:
docker run --rm ghcr.io/galgtonold/sojourn:latest node scripts/selfhost-init.mjs --stdout > .env && chmod 600 .envFetch the one file that describes the stack:
curl -fLo docker-compose.yml https://github.com/galgtonold/sojourn/releases/latest/download/docker-compose.all-in-one.ymlOpen .env, set SUPABASE_PUBLIC_URL and SITE_URL for your host, then:
docker compose up -dBoth files use the names Compose looks for on its own, so there are no -f or
--env-file flags to remember here or when you update.
Six containers come up in order, the schema is created from nothing, and
/admin offers to create your owner account. Full instructions, and the two
settings worth getting right →
Open the site. While it is unclaimed, every page redirects to
/admin/setup, where you name your site, pick an email and password, and
land signed in as its owner. There is nothing to seed and no default password:
the first account is the one you create.
Claim it before you point a domain at it. The first visitor to a fresh install becomes its owner, and newly issued TLS certificates are published publicly (Certificate Transparency), so a custom domain is discoverable within minutes. Claiming on the plain host or
*.vercel.appURL first avoids the race entirely. As a backstop the claim only stays open for 60 minutes — see the claim window if you miss it, which is recoverable.
Sojourn has exactly two kinds of account: you, and members you add. Readers never need one — all content is public-read, shared by URL.
Updating is the same two commands you started with, and the database keeps up by itself — schema migrations apply at container start, so there is no second step:
docker compose pull && docker compose up -dWhen the release notes say the compose file changed, download it again and add
--force-recreate. Compose compares a config by reference and not by content, so a replaced compose file leaves the old settings mounted while reporting that everything is up to date. See Upgrading.
Pin how much change you take unattended with SOJOURN_TAG — 0.2.1, 0.2, v0
or the default latest. Sojourn also tells you when a release is out, under
Settings → Updates.
Backing up is two commands, and both halves travel together, because a database dump without the photographs is an archive of captions:
sh scripts/backup.sh backupsThat writes one dated .tar.gz holding the full database dump — every schema,
including your logins — the photo files, and a manifest saying what it contains.
Put it somewhere that is not this machine. Restoring, and how to test a
restore before you need one →
Nothing, by default. No analytics, no error reporting, no phoning home — not to Vercel, not to Sentry, not to the people who wrote it. A fresh install talks to your Supabase project, your map tile provider, and nobody else.
Three switches turn parts of that on, each independently, each yours:
NEXT_PUBLIC_ANALYTICS, NEXT_PUBLIC_SENTRY_DSN (your readers' browsers) and
SENTRY_DSN (your server). Leave one unset and the corresponding library is
never even downloaded — not loaded-but-inert, absent.
The detail, and why the two Sentry switches are separate →
- Deployment — the three install paths in full, hosted Supabase setup, the claim window, backups, moving to a VPS later.
- Configuration — every environment variable, what turns each optional feature on, AI provider setup, web push, telemetry.
- Development — running it locally, the tech stack, project layout, how the data layer and migrations fit together.
- Security policy · Contributing
AGPL-3.0-only. Self-host it freely, forever, for yourself or for anyone else, and modify it however you like. Running a modified version as a service is fine too — the AGPL just asks that the people using it can get its source.
The third-party notices and what §13 asks of a modified deployment are in Licensing.