Wave - The Collaborative Open-Source Blogging Engine

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⚠ Under Construction ⚠

Quickstart

This docker compose file will give you everything you need to run Wave. See the following sections for explanations about the configuration and makeup of Wave. Replace <*_password> with generated passwords, just in case, replace your-time-zone with a sensible time zone for your users.

For extensive configuration you want to mount /configuration to a location on your system.

Afterwards you can access Wave on http://localhost.

To see how to create an admin account, read the following section. Afterwards for security you should Configure an Email Server.

version: '3.4'

name: wave
services:
  web:
    image: miawinter/wave:latest
    restart: unless-stopped
    ports:
      - "80:8080"
    links:
        - database:db
    environment:
      - "TZ=<your-time-zone>"
      - "WAVE_ConnectionStrings__DefaultConnection=Host=db; Username=wave; Password=<db_password>"
      - "WAVE_ConnectionStrings__Redis=redis,password=<redis_password>"
    volumes:
      - wave-files:/app/files
      - wave-config:/configuration
    networks:
      - wave
    depends_on:
      - database
  database:
    image: postgres:16.1-alpine
    restart: unless-stopped
    environment:
      - "POSTGRES_DB=wave"
      - "POSTGRES_USER=wave"
      - "POSTGRES_PASSWORD=<db_password>"
    volumes:
      -  wave-db:/var/lib/postgresql/data
    networks:
      - wave 
  redis:
    image: redis:7-alpine
    restart: unless-stopped
    command: redis-server --requirepass <redis_password> --save 60 1 --loglevel warning
    volumes:
      - wave-redis:/data
    networks:
      - wave

volumes:
  wave-files:
  wave-config:
  wave-db:
  wave-redis:
networks:
  wave:

Note: when binding the files volume to a local directory, keep in mind Wave runs by default on an internal "app" user (1654:1654), not root. You need to adjust your directory permissions or docker compose file accordingly (or just slap chmod -R 777 on it).

Admin Access

When Wave does not detect any admin account in its database on startup, which usually happens during setup, a message will be printed to it's server console, in docker accessible with docker logs wave-web-1:

There is currently no user in your installation with the admin role, go to /Admin and use the following password to self promote your account: [password]

The password is 16 digits long, navigate to http://localhost/Admin, if you are not logged in you will be redirected to the login page. Once you are authenticated and have entered the password on the admin page, the tool will be disabled and you will be a member of the admin role, giving you full access to all of Waves' features. Keep in mind that the password is generated every time on startup as long as there is no admin, so if you restart the container, there will be a different password in the console. Since pull request #3 probably stays the same.

Configuring Wave

Wave allows you to configure it in many different formats and in multiple places, and you can even use multiple of the following methods to supply configuration information. Please keep in mind that first, asp.net configuration keys are case-insensitive, and second, that there is a precedence in the different formats, so a value for the same key in two formats will be overwritten by one.

Configuration Locations

There are two main locations where Wave (and asp.net) takes its configuration from: The Environment, and the /configuration volume. Environment variables allow you to quickly set up a docker container, but the more you need to configure the more unmaintainable an .env file (or an environment: section in docker compose) becomes, so if you find yourself customizing a lot of Waves behaviour, consider using one of the many supported configuration file formats.

Configuration Keys

I will provide you the different configuration keys with a dot notation, like Email.Smtp.Host. In environment variables, these dots need to be replaced with two underscore characters: __ and prefixed with WAVE_.
In config files, those dots are hierarchy level, and you need to implement that dialects' syntax for it. Here some examples for Email.Smtp.Host:

Environment

WAVE_Email__Smtp__Host=smtp.example.com

JSON

{
    "Email": {
        "Smtp:": {
            "Host": "smtp.example.com"
        }
    }
}

YAML

Email:
  Smtp:
    Host: smtp.example.com

Supported Configuration Formats

Wave will take configuration from the following files in the /configuration volume, files later in this chain will have precedence over files earlier in that chain:

• config.json
• config.yml
• config.toml
• config.ini
• config.xml

After this, values from the Environment will take the highest precedence.

Configuring Email

Wave may send user related mails every now and then, to confirm an account, reset a password, etc. In order to support that, Wave needs to have a way to send Emails, currently SMTP is supported.

SMTP

The following configuration is required for Wave to connect to a smtp server (formatted in YAML for brevity).

Email:
  SenderEmail: noreply@example.com
  SenderName: Wave
  ServiceEmail: contact@example.com # used in various places, including email newsletter ListId Header
  Smtp:
    Live:
      Host: smtp.example.com
      Port: 25
      Username: user
      Password: password
      Ssl: true

Username and Password are optional if your server does not require it, and Ssl is true by default, only set it to false if you really need to, keeping security in mind.

Redis

Wave will generate a variety of keys for anti-forgery and logged in users during it's runtime. By default, these will be persisted into an in-memory key store, which will be lost when restarting the Wave container, causing all users to be logged out. To persist these keys outside of the containers' lifetime, you can configure a Redis connection string using ConnectionStrings.Redis.

Reverse Proxy

In order to make your Wave installation available to the web, you want to use a reverse proxy to handle things like SSL Certificates. Here are some examples.

Caddy

In the Caddyfile add:

<your domain> {
  encode gzip zstd

  @static path_regexp \.(js|css|svg|png|webp|jxl|jpg|jpeg|woff2)$
  header ?Cache-Control "max-age=600"
  header @static Cache-Control "max-age=3600"
  header -server
  reverse_proxy localhost:8080
}

If Caddy runs as a docker container, you need to use the Wave container name instead of localhost. Adapt the Cache-Control header to your needs, this config sets a fallback of 600 (10 minutes) and 3600 (60 minutes) for static assets like fonts, images, js and css. Wave will set a Cache-Control header for certain files, only overwrite them if you know what you are doing.

Nginx

TODO

RSS

Wave by default supports retrieving your articles with rss, both the vanilla and the atom flavour. The RSS endpoints are located at /rss/rss.xml and /rss/atom.xml. They also allow you to filter for a category with a category query parameter like so: /rss/atom.xml?category=cats.

If for some reason you wish to disable these endpoints and RSS with it, set the configuration key Features.RSS to false. Please don't disable it because you think it will make your site more secure or less scrapable, it does not.

Email Subscriptions

Wave can allow users to subscribe to E-Mail updates about new articles. In order to enable this feature you first need to set the configuration key Features.EmailSubscriptions to true. You also need to configure Emails in general, please follow the Configure an Email Server Section for this.

Besides this you will need to provide a mail distributor for these bulk E-Mails. This may be the same as you have already configured for live E-Mails, in this case just copy the configuration from there, but especially at larger volumes it is advisable to separate these concerns, and many hosting providers for large mail distribution will provide you with two sets of credentials for this.

If you have followed all the previous instructions, your E-Mail configuration may look like this:

Email:
  SenderEmail: noreply@example.com
  SenderName: Wave
  ServiceEmail: contact@example.com # used in various places, including email newsletter ListId Header
  Smtp:
    Live:
      Host: smtp.example.com
      Port: 25
      Username: user
      Password: password
      Ssl: true
    Bulk:
      Host: bulk.smtp.example.com
      Port: 465
      Username: bulk-user
      Password: bulk-password

Customizations

TODO implement more customizations, add description.

Currently supported:

Customization:
  AppName: My cool blog
  AppDescription: This is where I write about my cats
  AppUrl: https://example.com
  DefaultTheme: wave-dark
  DefaultLanguage: "en-GB"
  LogoLink: https://miawinter.de/img/logo.png
  Footer: (c) 2024 [Mia Rose Winter](https://miawinter.de/)

Featured Article Embeds

Wave allows access to the most recent article via the api endpoint /api/article/featured. This returns a json object with data about it, but there is also a script /featured.js that requests this automatically and inserts it into the page.

The simplest embed in your page looks like this:

<body>
  <!-- ... -->
  <div data-wave data-wave-pfp-size="150">
    Loading featured article...
  </div>
  <script id="wave-script" src="<your-wave-url>/featured.js" defer></script>
</body>

data-wave-pfp-size may be omitted, the default is 150. Wave will inject a default styled hero into the div with the data tag data-wave. If you want to provide your own template, you can use an html template:

<template data-wave-template>
  <div style="padding: 1em; border: 1px solid black; box-shadow: 4px 4px 0 0 currentColor; background: #ffb3c8;">
    <h1 data-wave-title style="margin: 0 0 0.5em 0"></h1>
    <img style="float: left; margin: 0 0.5em 0.5em 0; border: 1px solid transparent; border-radius: 0.25em" 
         data-wave-author-profilePictureUrl alt="" width="${pfpSize}" />
    <p style="line-height: 1.4em; margin: 0">
      <a data-wave-author-profileUrl target="_blank" style="text-decoration: none; color: black">
        <small data-wave-author-name style="font-weight: bold"></small><br>
      </a>
      <small data-wave-publishDate></small><br>
      <span data-wave-contentPreview></span><br>
      <a data-wave-browserUrl target="_blank" style="color: black">Read More</a>
    </p>
  </div>
</template>

This is the defautl template by the way. Any property in the json response of /api/article/featured corresponds to a data-wave-* attribute. With author and reviewer having their own nested tags as data-wave-author-* and data-wave-review-* respectively.

So to get the name of the article author, one could do this:

<span data-wave-author-name></span>

Values will always be inserted with innerText, except if the target tag is a link, then href is used, or an image tag, then src is used.

OpenID Connect

You can configure OIDC for users to be able to log in with a OAauth2 / OpenID provider of your choice.

Keep in mind that users will still need to provide and confirm an email address, as Wave requires it for account management, and users also have the option to set a local password as an alternative, as well as to remove that OpenID Service from their account after they did so.

Oidc:
  Authority: <authority base url>
  ClientId: <id>
  ClientSecret: <secret>

The Authority URL is usually the base url to the OpenID api, for example for Microsoft Azure/Entra/whatever they will call it next month it's https://login.microsoftonline.com/<tenant_id>/v2.0. If your providers response contains an "email" property, that email will be automatically filled in on registration, which is convenient when your users already use it to sign in. If your providers response contains a "roles" property, that one will be treated as one or more roles (comma separated) that that user should be assigned at signup. The available roles right now are Author, Reviewer, Moderator and Admin.

Additional Notes

TODO ?

License and Attribution

Wave by Mia Winter is licensed under the MIT License.

Copyright (c) 2024 Mia Rose Winter