tkr

A lightweight, HTML-only status feed for self-hosted personal websites. Written in PHP. Heavily inspired by status.cafe.

Features

• HTML and CSS implementation. No Javascript.
• RSS /feed/rss and Atom /feed/atom feeds
• CSS uploads for custom theming
• Custom emoji to personalize moods (unicode only)

Prerequisites

• A web server with PHP support, such as:
  • Apache with mod_php
  • nginx and php-fpm
• PHP 8.2+ with the PDO and PDO_SQLITE extensions
  • The PDO and PDO_SQLITE extensions are usually included by default
  • This might work with earlier PHP versions, but I've only tested 8.2

Installation

1. Download the latest tkr archive from https://subcultureofone.org/files/tkr/tkr.0.6.0.zip
2. Copy the .zip file to your server and extract it
3. Copy the tkr directory to the location you want to serve it from
   • on debian-based systems, /var/www/tkr is recommended
4. Make the storage directory writable by the web server account.
   • For example, on nginx on debian-based distributions:

   chown www-data:www-data /path/to/tkr/storage
   

5. Add the necessary web server configuration
   • Examples for common deployment scenarios, including documentation, are in the examples directory.

From git

If you'd prefer to install from git:

1. Clone this directoryand copy the /tkr directory to your web server.
   • Required subdirectories are:
     1. config
     2. public
     3. src
     4. storage
     5. templates
   • Exclude the other directories
2. Follow the main installation from step 2.

Initial configuration

1. Edit config/init.php to set the domain and base path correctly for your configuration.
   • subdirectory installation (e.g. https://my-domain.com/tkr)

   'base_url' => 'https://my-domain.com',
   'base_path' => '/tkr/',
   

   • subdomain installation (e.g. https://tkr.my-domain.com)

   'base_url' => 'https://tkr.my-domain.com',
   'base_path' => '/',
   

2. Browse to your tkr URL. You'll be presented with the setup screen to complete initial configuration.

Server configuration notes

The document root should be /PATH/TO/tkr/public. This will ensure that only the files that need to be accessible from the internet are served by your web server.

There is an .htaccess file in the tkr/ root directory. It's designed for the following installation scenario:

• shared hosting
• tkr/ is deployed installed to tkr/ under your web root. (e.g. public_html/tkr).
• tkr/public is the document root
• The other application directories are blocked both by tkr/.htaccess and by .htaccess files in the directories themselves. These are:
  • tkr/config
  • tkr/examples (not technically an application directory, but distributed with the .zip archive)
  • tkr/src
  • tkr/storage
  • tkr/templates

There are example configurations for other common scenarios in the examples directory.

• Apache VPS, subdomain (e.g. https://tkr.your-domain.com): examples/apache/vps/root
• Apache VPS, subfolder (e.g. https://your-domain.com/tkr): examples/apache/vps/subfolder
• Nginx VPS, subdomain (e.g. https://tkr.your-domain.com): examples/nginx/root
• Nginx VPS, subfolder (e.g. https://your-domain.com/tkr): examples/nginx/subfolder

Docker compose

The example directories contain docker-compose.yml files for the different configurations. To run tkr locally on your machine, copy the docker-compose file you're interested in to tkr/ and run docker compose up.

Storage

Ticks are stored in files on the filesystem under /tkr/storage/ticks. This directory must be writable by the web server user and so SHOULD NOT be served by the web server. If you set your document root to /tkr/public/, then you'll be fine.

The file structure is YYYY/MM/DD.txt. That is, each day's ticks are located in a file whose full path is /tkr/storage/ticks/YEAR/MONTH/DAY.txt. This is to prevent any single file from getting too large.

Each entry takes the form TIMESTAMP|TICK, where TIMESTAMP is the time that the entry was made and TICK is the text of the entry.

For illustration, here's a sample from the file /tkr/storage/ticks/2025/05/25 on my test system.

# cat /tkr/ticks/2025/05/25.txt
23:27:37|some stuff
23:27:45|some more, stuff

SQLite Database

tkr stores profile information, custom emojis, and uploaded css metadata in a SQLite database located at tkr/storage/db.

You don't have to do any database setup. The database is automatically created and initialized on first run.

TODO

• Validate HTML semantics on all pages
• Validate accessibility on all pages
• Add logging, including log viewer screen
• Improve exception handling
• Support microformats
• Support h-feed and JSON
• Allow customization of time zone and time display for ticks
• Probably a bunch of other stuff I'm not thinking of