# Infrastructure — how flove ships

1 Aug 2026 · Infrastructure · flove infrastructure gitea pipeline shelf

Nobody talks about plumbing until it leaks. That’s the compliment flove pays its infrastructure: it’s the least poetic part of the project, and the one everything else stands on. This shelf is where the plumbing gets explained — how flove runs, how it gets published, and what keeps it from falling over when the network drops.

## What’s on it

At the center is a self-hosted Gitea server, running in Docker on a machine in the same house that builds flove, holding eight repositories. It’s the wall of the workshop: private source lives behind it, and only what’s meant to be public walks out.

Out the front door runs a deliberately boring pipeline:

folders → Gitea (private source) → GitHub (public mirror) → flove.org.

Around that spine, the details that make it feel effortless:

- flove.org — the public home, served from GitHub Pages, with the solo PWA area as the real home: installable, offline-capable, with a service worker and an app manifest.
- The “go local” package — the whole solo area ships as a downloadable package, so flove can be taken off the shelf and run anywhere.
- The blog build script — drafts written privately, built locally, and only pushed into the public world when they’re ready to be read.
- The friendly 404 — the “receptionist” page that turns dead links into pointers, so even the wrong address gets a courteous answer.

## How it got here

flove started the ordinary way: folders, then a public GitHub page. The turn came in May when the wall went up — Gitea moved into the workshop so the source could stop depending on anyone else’s goodwill. The publish scripts, the service worker, the PWA manifest, the downloadable package — each one was bolted on as a pain appeared, until the plumbing reached the point of boring reliability. The blog itself is part of that same wall: its source lives privately and only the finished pages are let out.

## What’s ahead

- nety’s infrastructure — the decentral network will need a spine of its own, and that work starts here.
- More offline, more local — the trend of the whole shelf is the same as the project’s: fewer middlemen, more machine you control.
- Resilience checks — the wall should be tested the way walls get tested: by leaning on it.

Infrastructure is the least exciting shelf in the shop, and that’s exactly the point. When the plumbing works, the interesting stuff — the apps, the notes, the standards — gets to be interesting in peace.

slow it · flow it · love it.

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