A fully self-hosted travel blog for a military family. Built from scratch — no WordPress, no third-party CMS, no managed hosting. Posts are written through a custom admin panel, stored in SQLite, and published as static HTML files served directly by Caddy.

Also includes a full email server (Mailcow) at mail.neversettledblog.com, providing @neversettledblog.com addresses with webmail access.

How publishing works

• Posts are created and edited via the admin panel at /admin/
• The FastAPI backend handles auth (JWT), post CRUD, and image uploads
• Publishing a post renders it to a static .html file and rebuilds index.html
• Caddy serves all static files directly — no server-side rendering per request
• Image uploads stored on-disk, served by Caddy alongside post HTML

Infrastructure

• VPS (2 CPU, 8GB RAM) at 76.13.103.159
• Top-level Caddy (havoc-site) handles SSL termination for all domains via Let's Encrypt
• Blog Caddy container on port 8080 routes /api/* and /admin/* to the FastAPI service and serves static files for everything else
• FastAPI/uvicorn runs on port 8000 inside the Docker network
• Mailcow email server at mail.neversettledblog.com — web UI proxied through Caddy, email ports (25, 587, 465, 993) exposed directly

Stack