// the find
Mereithhh/vanblog
A self-hosted blogging system with Markdown editing, a full admin dashboard, analytics, image hosting, comments, and automatic HTTPS.
VanBlog is a self-hosted blogging platform combining a Next.js public site, a NestJS/MongoDB backend, and an Umi/Ant Design admin dashboard, aimed at people who want a full-featured personal blog (comments, analytics, image hosting) without touching WordPress or PHP. It's built primarily by and for a Chinese-speaking audience, though the English README and i18n work are underway.
The Next.js frontend uses SSG with ISR, so publishing a post doesn't trigger a full site rebuild — a real architectural choice, not just a buzzword. Deployment is genuinely low-friction: a Docker Compose setup with a real install script, ARM64 builds, and Caddy handling on-demand HTTPS issuance/renewal. Feature depth is unusually high for a self-hosted blog — collaborator accounts with permissions, image compression/watermarking on upload, webhook-triggered custom code on events — this isn't a toy. It also has actual CI test coverage (server tests and admin e2e via Playwright) running on PRs, which most projects this size skip.
The 'full theme system' and plugin system are both still on the roadmap despite being listed under Features — today customization means custom CSS/HTML/JS injection, not swappable themes. Everything is hard-wired to MongoDB with no ORM layer; 'additional databases' is a future item, so you're locked in if Mongo isn't your stack. Documentation and the admin UI are primarily Chinese with i18n unfinished, which is a real friction point for non-Chinese-speaking adopters despite the English README. The maintainer relies on an automated AI workflow to reproduce bugs and open PRs from issues — useful for throughput, but it means a meaningful chunk of incoming changes aren't hand-written, so review rigor before merge matters more than usual here.