# fossil is great to self-host
2024-05-13T12:51:38Z

Today, I'd like to talk about fossil:
=> https://fossil-scm.org/

It is solene, you probably already know her, who proposed to use it to host a forum for a french community about OpenBSD.
=> https://dataswamp.org/~solene/
=> https://fr.forum.puffy.cafe/wiki?name=Index

Indeed, fossil is well known as an alternative to git or hg. And a good one if you ever tried.
You can host your projects and publish source code quite easily.
But it's more than that.
It offers:

* a forum engine
* a wiki engine, and btw a sort-of website content manager
* a real-time chat

All this while staying very light and thus, self-hosting friendly. It even serve gzipped content by default!
Backups are easy, just lcone the repository or copy/rsync/scp/whatever the ".fossil" file.
Upgrades are painless, just upgrade the binary.

There are already good instructions to set it up:
=> https://fossil-scm.org/home/doc/trunk/www/server/openbsd/fastcgi.md

As you could read, fossil is very selfhosting friendly.
I found quite clever the use of a template to fill the mfs.

One may add a new "/etc/newsyslog.conf" entry to avoid evergrowing error log file.

```
/var/www/logs/fossil.log                644  5     300  *     Z
```

I wonder if it is worth adding a part about fossil on https://si3t.ch/ah/en/09-services/ ?

What do you think about fossil?

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