BlogDown Beta

A back-end agnostic, zero compilation, markdown blogging platform

Please ★ this repo if you found it useful ★ ★ ★

This repo was revived in August 2026 as a working historical artifact. The Polymer 1.x / bower / gulp 3 architecture is intact — nothing was modernized — but the toolchain was made reproducible again. A Polymer 1.x app still runs fine in current browsers because webcomponents-lite polyfills everything (HTML imports, custom elements v0) that browsers have since removed.

Requirements: docker (with compose) and GNU make. Run make prepare once to install the remaining dev tools (bats, shfmt) via asdf.

make serve     # dev server (gulp serve inside a node 8 container)
               #   -> http://localhost:8801  (try /#!/posts/hello-2026)
make build     # legacy production build (vulcanize + minify) -> dist/
make test      # legacy mocha unit tests (inside the container)
make test/e2e  # bats smoke test: serves the app, curls rendered output,
               #   and (if chrome + node >= 22 are installed) drives
               #   headless Chrome over CDP to assert markdown renders
               #   to HTML in a real browser
make stop      # tear the dev server down
make clean     # remove build artifacts

Without make: docker compose -f docker/compose.yaml up and open http://localhost:8801.

• bower deps repaired (bower.json): the molecules meta-package (PolymerElements/molecules) was deleted from GitHub — replaced with a direct dependency on marked-element (the only element this app used from it). The webcomponentsjs-safari-patch fork lost its 0.7.x tags — now pinned to the exact master commit (patched 0.7.24), with a resolutions entry so non-interactive installs resolve it.
• app/core/bower_components is vendored (committed, ~56MB, 145 packages): the bower registry and the 2017-era upstream repos are increasingly fragile (one had already vanished), so installing from the network is no longer required to run or build the app.
• gulp-envify removed: its manifest pins a deleted GitHub fork of loose-envify, which broke every npm install. Its single use in the gulpfile (substituting process.env.NODE_ENV during vulcanize) is now done with gulp-replace, which was already a dependency.
• Toolchain containerized (docker/Dockerfile): gulp 3's graceful-fs/natives dependency aborts on node >= 10, and node 8 has no builds for modern hosts (e.g. darwin-arm64), so the toolchain runs in a node:8.17.0-stretch container. The imagemin helpers (optipng, jpegtran) ship x86-only prebuilt binaries; the distro binaries from archive.debian.org are symlinked over them — the same fix the original 2017 Dockerfile applied on alpine.
• Makefile + make.mk wrapper, bats smoke test (tests/), and a sample post (hello-2026) proving markdown renders end-to-end.

• The original root Dockerfile (alpine 3.5 production image with nginx, dnsmasq and the thingdown/prerender sidecar) is preserved untouched as a historical artifact, but is not expected to build in 2026 (dead apk repos, dead envstamp release URL). Use docker/Dockerfile instead.
• npm run demo (gh-pages deploy) and the Disqus module talk to external services and are out of preservation scope.
• Some external badge/demo URLs in this README and the demo content are dead (docker hub build badges, blogdown.info) — kept for history.

1. Unzip the contents from HERE on your server

2. There is no step two. That's how easy it is to install BlogDown.

curl -OL https://github.com/thingdown/blogdown/releases/download/v0.2.0/blogdown.zip
unzip blogdown.zip && cd blogdown
python -m SimpleHTTPServer

Go to http://localhost:8000

docker run --name some-blogdown -v /volumes/blogdown-content:/app/content -p 8801:8801 thingdown/blogdown:latest

Go to http://localhost:8801

git clone https://github.com/thingdown/blogdown.git
yarn install # or `npm intall`
bower install
yarn start

1. Fork it!
2. Create your feature branch: git checkout -b my-new-feature
3. Commit your changes: git commit -m 'Add some feature'
4. Push to the branch: git push origin my-new-feature
5. Submit a pull request :D

MIT License

Jam Risser © 2017

• Jam Risser - Author
• Polymer

Changelog