A single instance of tmpbbs is an ephemeral, anonymous forum site. All posts are stored in memory and lost when the process stops. It's a single static binary and does not require the internet or any disk. It runs on a wide variety of low-powered hardware including older wireless routers.

Multiple instances of tmpbbs can be linked so that posts are replicated in one or both directions. This enables different topologies such as a decentralized mesh where each instance has all the posts, trees, backup instances and read-only replicas.

Features

• Markdown
• emoji shortcodes
• optional TLS (using --tls-cert and --tls-key options)
• tripcodes in username#secret format
• shareable URL QR codes
• every instance distributes the software by serving its own binary

Installation

go install github.com/mmb/tmpbbs@latest

Container Images

docker run --publish 8080:8080 mm62/tmpbbs

or

docker run --publish 8080:8080 ghcr.io/mmb/tmpbbs

Options

% tmpbbs --help
Usage of tmpbbs:
  -u, --css-urls strings             comma-separated list of CSS URLs ($TMPBBS_CSS_URLS) (default [/static/main.css])
  -m, --emoji                        enable emoji shortcode expansion ($TMPBBS_EMOJI) (default true)
  -g, --grpc-listen-address string   <host>:port to listen on for gRPC ($TMPBBS_GRPC_LISTEN_ADDRESS) (default ":8081")
  -h, --help                         usage help
  -j, --json-log                     set log output format to JSON ($TMPBBS_JSON_LOG)
  -l, --listen-address string        <host>:port to listen on for HTTP ($TMPBBS_LISTEN_ADDRESS) (default ":8080")
  -p, --load-posts strings           comma-separated paths of YAML or JSON files of posts to load, format [{"title":"","author":"","body":""}]
                                     ($TMPBBS_LOAD_POSTS)
  -i, --pull-interval duration       peer pull interval ($TMPBBS_PULL_INTERVAL) (default 30s)
  -d, --pull-peers strings           comma-separated list of tmpbbs gRPC <tls://>host:gRPCport to pull posts from ($TMPBBS_PULL_PEERS)
  -q, --qr-codes                     enable shareable URL QR codes ($TMPBBS_QR_CODES) (default true)
  -r, --replies                      enable replies ($TMPBBS_REPLIES) (default true)
  -e, --replies-per-page int         number of replies to show per page ($TMPBBS_REPLIES_PER_PAGE) (default 10)
  -b, --serve-binary                 serve tmpbbs binary at /self ($TMPBBS_SERVE_BINARY) (default true)
  -f, --serve-fs-paths strings       comma-separated list of urlprefix=/local/dir to serve ($TMPBBS_SERVE_FS_PATHS)
  -t, --title string                 site title ($TMPBBS_TITLE) (default "tmpbbs")
  -c, --tls-cert string              path to PEM server certificate ($TMPBBS_TLS_CERT)
  -k, --tls-key string               path to PEM server key ($TMPBBS_TLS_KEY)
  -a, --tripcode-salt string         random salt to use for generating tripcodes ($TMPBBS_TRIPCODE_SALT)
  -v, --version                      print version

Peering

An instance can pull posts from any number of other instances by adding their host:port to the --pull-peers option, where port is the port in the peer's --grpc-listen-address (default 8081).

If the peer instances were started in TLS mode, their gRPC server will also be in TLS mode. In that case TLS must be enabled on the client instance by prefixing the address with tls:// in --pull-peers. If the peer instances are not using TLS --pull-peers should just have their host:grpcport but in this case the gRPC traffic will not be encrypted.

Two instances can pull from each other and posts will not be duplicated. UUIDs are used for globally unique post identifiers.