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That's Remarkable by 42 times

Adding useless features to yet another forgettable blog

The developer’s mind works in mysterious ways…

I was looking into how to jump on the “self-hosting” trend that’s been going on lately. I have to admit that my timing wasn’t perfect, considering the current RAM prices. But, honestly, I don’t need or want to build (and maintain) a pricey server farm in my house. So, I decided to do something simple enough to be hosted on a potato board like a Raspberry Pi 2.

Why not add a self-hosted comment section to my blog?

Deal’s done. To the laboratory!

Bill of materials

Hoping to find an existing project, I set the following requirements:

  • Open Source / Self-hosting
  • Linux ARM64 support
  • No heavy database dependencies (this isn’t Facebook)
  • Single binary
  • Privacy for my users (again, this isn’t Facebook)

Long story short: I found this wonderful little piece of code, Remark42.

For hosting, I went with OVH’s basic VPS offering: it’s dirt cheap, more powerful than a potato, and it lets me avoid giving money to the usual big tech corps.

Doing the thing

Start the VPS

Visited the OVH VPS page, threw some money at them, waited 10 minutes, and now I have a beautiful Fedora-based server under my direct command.

Why did I choose Fedora instead of [insert distro name]?

  • There’s no Arch Linux listed (btw).
  • I dislike Ubuntu.
  • Debian is way too stable.
  • Linus Torvalds uses Fedora.

Are we up to date? I don’t think so…

sudo dnf upgrade --refresh
sudo reboot

I love the smell of fresh packages in the morning.

Install Remark42

wget https://github.com/umputun/remark42/releases/download/v1.14.0/remark42.linux-amd64.tar.gz
tar -xzf remark42.linux-amd64.tar.gz

# move binary into its final place
sudo mv remark42.linux-amd64 /usr/local/bin/remark42
sudo chown root:root /usr/local/bin/remark42

# handle SELinux
sudo restorecon -v /usr/local/bin/remark42

I want my executables the way I want my distributed services: the more isolated and decoupled, the better.

Let’s create a dedicated user and directory for the Remark42 server process:

# create service user for Remark42 process
sudo useradd -r -s /usr/sbin/nologin remark42

# setup Remark42 workdir
sudo mkdir /var/remark42
sudo chown remark42:remark42 /var/remark42
sudo chmod 750 /var/remark42/

The good folks behind Remark42 have already provided an example systemd unit template for me. How nice and convenient.

Now tapping sudo nano /etc/systemd/system/remark42.service:

[Unit]
Description=Remark42 Commenting Server
After=syslog.target
After=network.target

[Service]
Type=simple
EnvironmentFile=/etc/remark42.env
ExecStart=/usr/local/bin/remark42 server
WorkingDirectory=/var/remark42
Restart=on-failure
User=remark42
Group=remark42

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

Anyone who has ever configured a systemd unit should already know the next step just by looking at the just-created service.

It’s time to personalize our Remark42 instance. A wonderful list of all available environment variables is available on the official docs website.

Now, let’s run sudo nano /etc/remark42.env:

REMARK_URL=https://remark42.domain.net
REMARK_PORT=8080
SECRET=my_symmetric_jwt_secret
SITE=my_site
SIMPLE_VIEW=true
EMOJI=true

AUTH_ANON=true # debug and testing during installation

AUTH_GITHUB_CID=my_github_client_id
AUTH_GITHUB_CSEC=my_github_client_secret

I can now give life to my personal Remark42 server:

sudo systemctl daemon-reload
sudo systemctl enable --now remark42

Going public with Caddy and Let’s Encrypt

A quick search for “simple Let’s Encrypt reverse proxy” returns Caddy right at the top of the results.

Seems legit enough to me!

sudo dnf install caddy
sudo nano /etc/caddy/Caddyfile

Just replace the whole thing with something like this…

remark42.domain.net {
  encode gzip
  reverse_proxy 127.0.0.1:8080
}

…a quick reboot…

sudo caddy fmt --overwrite /etc/caddy/Caddyfile
sudo systemctl enable --now caddy

Done.

Happy commenting

If you want to.

© 2025 Giacomo Gregoletto