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How to setup Linkwarden (with Docker & Caddy)

Untested

Description

Linkwarden is a self-hosted, open-source collaborative bookmark manager to collect, organize and archive webpages.

The objective is to organize useful webpages and articles you find across the web in one place, and since useful webpages can go away (see the inevitability of Link Rot), Linkwarden also saves a copy of each webpage as a Screenshot and PDF, ensuring accessibility even if the original content is no longer available.

Create a DNS record

Go to cPanel and add a new record (e.g. links.akdscloud.eu).

Caddy

links.akdscloud.eu:443 {
    header Strict-Transport-Security max-age=31536000;
    reverse_proxy localhost:3000
}

Files and Folders

cd ~/services
mkdir -p linkwarden/{data,db}
touch linkwarden/linkwarden.env

Docker

  1. Add the links section to your docker-compose.yml file:

      linkwarden:
    image: ghcr.io/linkwarden/linkwarden:latest
    container_name: linkwarden
    restart: unless-stopped
    env_file:
      - ./linkwarden.env
    ports:
      - "127.0.0.1:3000:3000"
    volumes:
      - ./linkwarden/data:/data/data
    depends_on:
      - linkwarden-db
      - caddy

  linkwarden-db:
    image: postgres:17-alpine
    container_name: linkwarden-db
    restart: unless-stopped
    env_file:
      - ./linkwarden.env
    volumes:
      - ./linkwarden/db:/var/lib/postgresql/data
    depends_on:
      - caddy

    Add this to linkwarden.env:

    # Database configuration
POSTGRES_USER=linkwarden
POSTGRES_PASSWORD=your_very_secure_password_here
POSTGRES_DB=linkwarden

# Linkwarden configuration
NEXTAUTH_SECRET=your_random_secret_key_here
NEXTAUTH_URL=https://links.akdscloud.eu
DATABASE_URL=postgresql://${POSTGRES_USER}:${POSTGRES_PASSWORD}@linkwarden-db:5432/${POSTGRES_DB}
NEXT_PUBLIC_DISABLE_REGISTRATION=true

    You can generate a secure random string for POSTGRES_PASSWORD and NEXTAUTH_SECRET with: 

    openssl rand -hex 32

  2. Download and start links:

    docker compose up -d linkwarden

  3. Restart Caddy to get an SSL certificate (details here)

Try it out

See if you can access the links web interface.

Troubleshooting

If it doesn't work, see the troubleshooting guide.

Configuration

Admin account

Create an admin account from the web interface.

If you can't create an account,

  • comment NEXT_PUBLIC_DISABLE_REGISTRATION=true from the docker-compose.yml file
  • docker compose down linkwarden
  • docker compose up -d linkwarden
  • then try again (to create the admin account)

Official site

Github page