this post was submitted on 21 Oct 2025
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Not an ad, I'm not involved with Bento (or Stirling, for that matter). I've been unhappy with Stirling for a while (why do documents need to be uploaded to the server? That makes it really hard to safely host publicly. Why is it so slow? Plus, too many things are put behind a fucking paywall).

Learned about Bento this morning, tried it out, really liked it, spent an hour today packaging it for nixpkgs. It doesn't quite have feature parity with Stirling yet, but at least for me, everything I need is there, it's fast, and it keeps processing in the browser. Like, not even joking: the output of the build process/nixpkg are just a couple of static HTML files and some WASM. No server-side components at all. Really refreshing to see.

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[–] seang96@spgrn.com 9 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (10 children)

I want to swap to this but also want to do a few PRs but haven't had the time.

  • Dockerfile exposes port 80 and runs as root
  • Less concerning, but dislike it, the scripts and CSS use remote cdns rather than being bundled locally

Otherwise I am excited for this. Stirling doesn't really support replicating even with license and its fat image takes up a bit of my disk space for images.

[–] smiletolerantly@awful.systems 2 points 1 day ago (9 children)

Yeah those are good points. Also noticed the CDN thing, it's a bit annoying for a privacy-first project... But should be an easy fix 😄

Stirling's backend is Java. So, yeah, heavy and slow sounds about right.

[–] seang96@spgrn.com 1 points 21 hours ago (8 children)

Yeah very exciting project and to be honest a lot of popular services run as root by default. That said this ones harder to change from port 80 without changing the image. Could mount a nginx.conf to override probably though.

[–] smiletolerantly@awful.systems 3 points 21 hours ago (2 children)

Why not open a PR to make it configurable? The maintainer is super active and friendly.

[–] seang96@spgrn.com 3 points 20 hours ago

Plan to if no one beats me to it... Just gotta find time when I am free and have the energy to program more.

[–] seang96@spgrn.com 1 points 19 hours ago (1 children)

More worryingly now looking at loaded JS again it loads an analytics JavaScript file too.

https://github.com/alam00000/bentopdf/blob/main/index.html#L9

[–] smiletolerantly@awful.systems 3 points 19 hours ago (1 children)

While I don't like it, it's not hidden either:

https://bentopdf.com/privacy.html

There should definitely be an option to disable this for self-hosting, but if it's just a counter for how often each tool is used by all users combined... Eh...

(Stirling also has something similar)

[–] seang96@spgrn.com 1 points 18 hours ago (1 children)

Yeah stirling has options to remove though, at least I remember seeing the option since the beginning and disabled it haha. Option to disable that should probably be a 3rd PR then got some work to do lol

[–] smiletolerantly@awful.systems 1 points 18 hours ago (1 children)

Thank you for your sacrifice :D

[–] seang96@spgrn.com 1 points 9 hours ago (1 children)

Guess I don't have to, the dev released a new update without analytics, scripts and fonts are internal and created an issue for running as root which someone's assigned to. This project got some crazy momentum!

[–] smiletolerantly@awful.systems 1 points 4 hours ago

Oh wow, awesome!

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