HN Express

Shows the Hacker News front page (via the official HN API, in HN’s own rank order), with an AI-generated summary and representative image for each linked article. Summaries are generated in the background by a locally-running Ollama model — never on the request path. The web UI is plain server-rendered HTML that only reads from a local SQLite database.

Source: github.com/cleverswine/hn-express

Code organization

Three npm workspaces sharing one SQLite file:

db/ — SQLite schema + query helpers.
worker/ — background process: polls the HN API into the database, then summarizes articles (fetch → extract text/image, falling back to a headless browser when needed → Ollama).
web/ — Express server that renders the front page from the database.

Running with Docker

Each workspace has its own Dockerfile (web/Dockerfile, worker/Dockerfile); both are built from the repo root as the build context, since they need the sibling db/ package. docker-compose.yml runs both together, bind-mounting $HOME/.config/hn/data from the host into both containers so they share the same SQLite database — the same path the app uses by default outside Docker (see Data).

Ollama itself is expected to keep running on the host, not in a container — the worker reaches it at http://host.docker.internal:11434 by default (wired up via extra_hosts in the compose file, works on Docker 20.10+ on Linux/Mac/Windows).

docker compose up --build

Then open http://localhost:3000. Optionally copy .env.example to .env first — compose reads it automatically for the defaults shown in docker-compose.yml (HN_FRONTPAGE_SIZE, OLLAMA_MODEL, PORT, etc.); everything works without one.

Configuration

All configuration is via environment variables (see .env.example for the full list and defaults), including PORT, HN_FRONTPAGE_SIZE, FETCH_INTERVAL_MS, SUMMARY_CONCURRENCY, OLLAMA_HOST, and OLLAMA_MODEL.

Data

The SQLite database lives at $HOME/.config/hn/data/hn.sqlite3 (created automatically on first run, including under Docker via a bind mount to the same host path — see Running with Docker). Delete it to start fresh. Override the location with DB_PATH (see .env.example).