About Journal

Journal is a blog engine that you can use to create your own blog.

It is different from most other blog engines in that it is a serverless application, meaning it is very cheap to host and extremely scalable, while still letting us write server-side logic using Laravel.

Journal has been built as an example application for the Serverless Visually Explained course. As such, it is available to course members.

Here is the complete stack of Journal:

• Laravel renders the website and runs on AWS Lambda
• Custom pages (like this one) can be created with Blade templates
• Blog articles are written in static files using Markdown
• TailwindCSS is used as the CSS framework
• Assets are compiled using Laravel Mix and deployed to AWS S3
• CloudFront is used as a CDN to optimize performances

The whole stack is deployed using a single configuration file with the Serverless Framework.

When running in production, the whole website is read-only. It reads its content from files and uses no database. That makes it very scalable, extremely cheap to run, and extremely secure.

To write new articles, admin pages are available but only when running locally. No user accounts are necessary. Run the website locally using php artisan serve and start creating or editing posts via the website or your favorite Markdown editor.