A self-hosted text file webreader made with Perl, Bootstrap 3 and Plack

I keep some stories in .txt format in a directory. I wanted a simple way to be able to pick a random one and start reading. This is the result.

• Simple reading and nice display of text files (no markup or html processing done)
• Ability to search based on filename (no content search)
• Can edit files in-situ
• Can delete files (Note: There's no confirmation and it will need write permission over the files)
• Allows you to vote up and down a file by 10 points out of a 100, or give a particularly great file a "Top score" of 100
• Allows you to pick "great" files, those whose score is over 90
• It will auto-add new files to the database.
• Score is saved in a mysql/mariadb database.
• Fast. Tested on dirs with many hundreds of files, should be good for many tens of thousands. Only rescans periodically so doesn't rescan each time.
• Runs as a systemd service on a configurable port. systemd unit file supplied

Requires linux or similar. Bootstrap is loaded via cdn, so no installation of that is required.

1. Install Plack, using either your distro's package manager or cpanm. Specifically these modules:

Plack::Request
Plack::Builder

Picky also uses DBI and File::Slurp but these are both in Perl Core and should be available for any recent version of Perl. 2. Copy picky.psgi file somewhere suitable, such as /var/www/html 3. Edit picky.service so it points to that file and install where your distro puts Systemd service files. Eg, in Debian and Centos, this is /etc/systemd/system/ 4. Enable and start the service:

systemctl daemon-reload
systemctl start picky
systemctl enable picky

5. Create a database in mysql with the contents of the picky.sql file and a user that can read it (Username and password are saved in picky.psgi)
6. All going well, point your webbrowser at that machine, port 5001 (or whatever you specified in picky.service)