Haven
A privacy-first, self-hostable blogging platform for sharing with friends and family via private RSS feeds.
What is Haven?
Haven is a self-hostable private blogging platform built with Ruby on Rails, designed for personal sharing with friends and family. It solves the problem of maintaining privacy in blogging by offering controlled user access, no self-signup to prevent spam, and private RSS feeds for secure content distribution.
Individuals or small groups who want a private, self-hosted blog for sharing personal updates, photos, and media with a select circle of friends and family without commercial tracking or ads.
Developers choose Haven for its privacy-first approach, ease of use with a built-in web interface and markdown editor, and low-bandwidth optimization, making it a lightweight, customizable alternative to heavier platforms like WordPress or Ghost.
Overview
Self-hostable private blogging
Use Cases
Best For
- Creating a private family blog to share updates and photos securely
- Self-hosting a personal journal with controlled access for friends
- Building a low-bandwidth blog for users in areas with slow internet
- Setting up a custom RSS reader to follow favorite blogs privately
- Deploying a lightweight blogging platform on a Raspberry Pi or home server
- Sharing media-rich content (images, videos, audio) in a private environment
Not Ideal For
- Organizations needing a public-facing blog with SEO, comments, and user engagement features
- Developers looking for a headless CMS to integrate with modern JavaScript frameworks like React or Vue
- Users who require automated user onboarding and scalability for large audiences, as Haven has no self-signup
Pros & Cons
Pros
Explicitly designed for private sharing with friends and family, featuring no self-signup to prevent spam and unauthorized access, as emphasized in the README.
Includes a built-in markdown editor with live preview and web-based tools for managing users and customizing the blog, making it accessible without technical expertise.
Automatically downscales images to reduce page load times and avoids JavaScript frameworks, ads, and trackers, ensuring fast performance even on slow connections.
Provides private RSS feeds for followers and a built-in reader to follow other blogs, all within the same platform for seamless content consumption.
Cons
The AWS deployment script takes 20 minutes and can fail with dependency issues, requiring manual intervention like gem installations, as noted in the README.
Heroku deployment is discouraged for production due to ephemeral storage causing image loss and reader update issues, and it's becoming costly with Heroku's free tier removal.
Lacks a plugin system or API for third-party integrations, unlike WordPress, restricting customization to only CSS and fonts without advanced add-ons.
Open Source Alternative To
Haven is an open-source alternative to the following products:
Ghost is a headless content management system and blogging platform designed for publishers, with a focus on modern web technologies and performance.
WordPress is a free and open-source content management system (CMS) written in PHP and paired with a MySQL or MariaDB database, used for creating websites and blogs.
Frequently Asked Questions
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