Your own guestbook

You can put this guestbook on your own site for FREE. It's a folder of plain files for the page and one Python file for the server, and the server needs nothing but Python 3.8 or newer, with no packages to install.

The two pieces

• The page is everything in app/. Put it wherever your site's files are, for example in a guestbook/ folder. It talks to the server at api/ next to itself, so /guestbook/ talks to /guestbook/api/.
• The server is server/guestbook.py. It listens on 127.0.0.1 only, which means your web server has to pass api/ along to it.

Settings

The server reads four settings from its environment:

Setting	What it's for	Default
GUESTBOOK_DATA	the folder for entries.json, counter.json and the log	data/ next to the repo
GUESTBOOK_PORT	the port it listens on	8452
GUESTBOOK_PUBLIC	the page's public address, for the links in your messages	http://127.0.0.1:8452
GUESTBOOK_NOTIFY	a command it runs as <command> "Guestbook" "<message>" for each new entry	none (the log only)

For the notify command, anything that sends you a message works: a script that calls signal-cli, ntfy, a Telegram bot or plain mail.

With Caddy

handle_path /guestbook/api/* {
    reverse_proxy 127.0.0.1:8452
}

The page folder is served like any other files. If you put Cloudflare in front, the server reads the visitor's address from CF-Connecting-IP for the rate limit, and otherwise from X-Forwarded-For.

Keeping it running

A small systemd unit is the easiest way:

[Service]
Environment=GUESTBOOK_DATA=/var/lib/guestbook
Environment=GUESTBOOK_PUBLIC=https://example.com/guestbook
Environment=GUESTBOOK_NOTIFY=/usr/local/bin/notify-me
ExecStart=/usr/bin/python3 /opt/guestbook/guestbook.py
Restart=always

Then open your page, sign it once yourself, and check that the message with the link reaches you. If it doesn't, the log file in the data folder says why.

Basically, copy two things, add three lines to your web server, and you have a guestbook.