Self-hosting a website on a home PC

This blog is served from an ordinary desktop at home. No VPS, no static hosting service. Here's how it's wired up.

The pieces#

Piece	Job
Node.js	Runs a small web server that turns Markdown posts into pages
cloudflared	Keeps an outgoing tunnel open to Cloudflare
Cloudflare	Owns the DNS for `meyo.dev`, handles HTTPS and sends visitors down the tunnel
Task Scheduler	Starts everything at login; a watchdog restarts anything that crashes

Why a tunnel instead of port forwarding?#

The classic way is to open a port on the router and point the domain at your home IP address. A tunnel flips that around: the PC makes an outgoing connection to Cloudflare, and visitors come in through it.

No ports open on the router
The home IP address stays private
HTTPS certificates are handled automatically
It still works behind CGNAT, where port forwarding is impossible

The web server only listens on 127.0.0.1, so nothing on the local network can reach it directly either. The tunnel is the only way in.

Setting it up#

Install cloudflared and link it to a Cloudflare account:

powershell

winget install --id Cloudflare.cloudflared
cloudflared tunnel login

Create a named tunnel and point the domain at it:

bash

cloudflared tunnel create meyo-dev
cloudflared tunnel route dns meyo-dev meyo.dev
cloudflared tunnel route dns meyo-dev www.meyo.dev

Then tell the tunnel where to send traffic, in ~/.cloudflared/config.yml:

yaml

tunnel: <tunnel-id>
credentials-file: ~/.cloudflared/<tunnel-id>.json

ingress:
  - hostname: meyo.dev
    service: http://127.0.0.1:8080
  - hostname: www.meyo.dev
    service: http://127.0.0.1:8080
  - service: http_status:404

And start it:

bash

cloudflared tunnel run meyo-dev

The web server#

The server is a single Node.js file built on the standard http module. Posts are Markdown files with a few lines of front matter on top. They're read from disk on every request, so publishing a post is just saving a file:

const posts = loadPosts(POSTS_DIR);
const post = posts.find(p => p.slug === slug);
sendPage(res, 200, views.post(post, renderMarkdown(post.body)));

The catch#

The site is only up while the PC is. If it sleeps, reboots or loses power, meyo.dev goes down with it. For a personal blog, that's a fair trade.