I was recently talking to a friend that uses AO3 a lot and was wanting to have a personal self-hosted archive of their fics. After doing some research online, it seems to either not really exist or people use AO3 self hosted. The problem is that setting AO3 up to self host seems to be an absolute nightmare of an experience.
Because of that, I decided to create MyFicDB. A fully self hosted AO3 “clone” (kind of?) with a tagging and series system, actor support, chapters within fics, exporting individual stories to markdown and html and it is all stored in SQLite so can be taken outside of the project at any time you wish - either via a full database export or exporting all stories to HTML.
There’s a full installation guide over on GitHub here but the gist of it is this
- Download the example docker-compose.yml file
- Read the instructions
- docker-compose up -d
- Create your account
- Bish bash bosh.
It’s created as a single user system, not as a multi user system. One account, everything owned by that account - so if you and you someone else in your family want to use it, you’ll need to have your own instances. I’ve had it running for about two months now with zero crashes (surprisingly), the database is only at 10MB with actors populated with images, stories created with chapters, and multiple tags and series.
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