Link Ace

Posted on Thursday, Nov 17, 2022 by RastaCalavera | Series: selfhosted Apps | selfhosted, selfhosting, archive, docker, open source, bookmark archive, 2-factor

What is Linkace?

Linkace provides a way to archive a website, add tags to the website archive, add website archives to organized lists and present all this information to the user using a private or public dashboard! To see a more concise list of features, you should checkout the page features1 because the creator can explain everything better than my summarization.

How to Setup Linkace?

There are two options when setting up Linkace; the simple option2 or the advanced option3. The main difference between the two is how the app is served and the database backend it connects too as well. The creator recommends that if you have full control of your system to use the advanced feature and if you are limited to your environment, then the simple approach should be used.

I personally chose to go the simple route because I was just testing the application, but maybe down the line I will migrate to the advanced setup.

To get the needed files from GitHub onto my server, I first made a folder and then entered it.

mkdir linkace && cd linkace

Then grabbed the files using

wget https://github.com/Kovah/LinkAce/releases/download/v1.10.5/linkace-v1.10.5-docker-simple.zip

and finally unzipped the folders using unzip.

This leaves you with the docker-compose file and the .env file that you can customize as needed.

In my instance, I run all my apps behind SWAG so I needed to add the external network connection by putting a bit of code at the end of the docker-compose file that looks like this:

networks:
  default:
    name: swag
    external: true

I hit a snag with permission issues with the containers trying to reference by .env file and I am not sure if I needed to include a PUID PGID value in the environment but I just ended up using chmod 777 .env when the containers were down and when I brought them back up, everything seemed to be working just fine.

2-Factor Auth??

As I was setting this up for the blog, I saw that there was a setting to enable 2-Factor authentication. I have never tried this so I gave it a whirl and it worked great! It generates a QR code that can be scanned by a password manager, like bitwarden, and then it generates a 6 digit code that you have to enter after putting in your normal login credentials.

Now I couldn’t get the scan QR code feature to work, but I was able to enter the token in manually and low and behold it was seamless! So now I have 2-Factor auth on a self-hosted application!

Email tie in?

The documentation is great but things get a little weird when it comes to email. I’ve struggled using Gmail in the past and using tokens and doing weird calls in the container terminal but this project didn’t really explain the steps for this and there wasn’t much chatter in their community spaces4.

Worth Checking Out!!

I think Linkace is a really cool project and recommend you give it a whirl!

Project Website

Support the Project


  1. Project Features ↩︎

  2. Simple Setup with Docker ↩︎

  3. Advanced Setup with Docker ↩︎

  4. GitHub Discussions ↩︎