Little Moments

A minimalist and self-hostable web app for sharing photos and videos with close friends and family.

Status

• Milestone 1: Read-only TinyBeans mirror - Completed 2026-03-25
• Milestone 2: Add real database - Completed 2026-03-28
• Milestone 3: Use cloud storage - Completed 2026-04-11
• Milestone 4: User authentication - Completed 2026-06-13
• Milestone 5: Deployment to the web - Completed 2026-06-15
• Milestone 6: Media uploads - Completed 2026-07-13
• Milestone 7: User interaction - Incomplete
• Milestone 8: Full functionality - Incomplete

Requirements

• Go 1.26
• SQLite
• ffmpeg

If you have Nix, you can start a development shell with all required dependencies pre-installed:

nix develop

Quick start

Importing data

Currently, the app is a read-only mirror of your TinyBeans data.

To export your data from TinyBeans, use tinybeans-export to dump your photos, videos, comments, and users from TinyBeans into a local folder.

If you don't have TinyBeans data, you can use the test data in ./testdata/tinybeans-export

# Replace with your actual TinyBeans export if you have one.
# Leave as-is to use test data.
TINYBEANS_EXPORT_DIR=./testdata/tinybeans-export

go run ./cmd/import-from-tinybeans \
  --media-dir ./data/media \
  "${TINYBEANS_EXPORT_DIR}"

Start the server

To run the development version of the app, run the following:

PORT=4120 ./dev-scripts/serve

Little Moments will begin serving at http://localhost:4120

Deployment

Fly.io

To deploy manually to Fly.io, replace fly.toml with your own, and provide a Fly API token:

FLY_API_TOKEN='your-api-token' nix run .#deploy-to-fly

The deploy targets the app named in fly.toml. Set FLY_APP to deploy to a differently-named app without editing fly.toml.

The image is tagged with the current commit (git rev-parse --short HEAD). Set DEPLOY_IMAGE_TAG to override it.

Design doc hot reload

Run the design doc server, then open the URL it prints:

dev-scripts/serve-design-doc

Scope

Little Moments is maintained by Michael Lynch as a fun hobby project.

Due to time limitations, I keep the app's scope limited to only the features that I use. That unfortunately means that I sometimes reject proposals or contributions for perfectly good features. It's nothing against those features, but I only have bandwidth to maintain features that I use.