Installation

inkwell ships as a single Rust binary and a Docker image built from the same source. Pick whichever fits the target host.

Docker

Requires a working Docker daemon.

docker build -t inkwell:latest .
docker run --rm -p 8080:8080 \
  -v "$PWD/config.yaml:/app/config.yaml:ro" \
  -v inkwell-data:/data \
  inkwell:latest

The image listens on port 8080 and stores the SQLite cache (plus, if enabled, the Gemini TLS material) in /data. Mount a named volume there to persist state across container recreation. The bundled config is baked in at /app/config.yaml; the -v above overrides it with a config on the host.

From source

Requires Rust 1.80 or newer.

git clone https://codeberg.org/kendal/inkwell.git
cd inkwell
cargo build --release

The binary is written to ./target/release/inkwell. It takes a single positional argument — the path to a YAML config file.

cp config.example.yaml config.yaml
./target/release/inkwell config.yaml

Expected output:

INFO scheduler armed — refresh: '@every 10m', purge: '0 3 * * *', article_ttl_days: 30
INFO listening on http://0.0.0.0:5050

On a Debian or Ubuntu build host, pkg-config and ca-certificates are required at build time; both are installed automatically by the shipped Dockerfile. No system libraries are required at runtime.

First configuration

Any usable config file needs at least an rss: block listing one or more feeds. The shipped config.example.yaml covers the common shape:

rss:
  groups:
    - name: "Tech"
      feeds:
        - https://lobste.rs/rss
        - https://news.ycombinator.com/rss

That block is read only on the first launch to seed the SQLite database. Once feeds and groups have been edited through the /admin page, the database is the source of truth and the config's rss: section is effectively read-only documentation.

For every other field, see the configuration reference.

Next

• Self-hosting — running inkwell behind a reverse proxy, with backups and upgrades.
• Reading — what the Kindle-facing UI looks like.