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Author

Ali Arbab

Project

06 / LameCRAFT

Status

Self-hosted — private by design

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§ 01

Pitch

LameCRAFT

A self-hosted home server, the control panel that runs it, and the design system everything else borrows.

A home machine serving my own sites to the internet through a Cloudflare tunnel — FastAPI on uvicorn, no port forwarding, no hosting bill. A Python control panel, packaged as a Windows executable, watches its processes and network. And the Command Nexus design system: one JSON spec of colours, type and motion rules that MagLock's app and my study pages are both built from. Private by design, so there is no public link.

  • 1JSON spec for the whole look
  • ₹0Hosting bill
  • 50msMaster animation loop
  • 25Written design rules

As of

§ 02

Access

  • Live

    Not publicly hosted

  • Source

    Private infrastructure — no public link

§ 03

Server

A home machine, on the internet, with nothing exposed.

My sites and tools are served from a machine at home by FastAPI on uvicorn. The internet reaches it through a Cloudflare tunnel: the server dials out, so serving the sites needs no port opened on the router and the machine is never addressed directly. A new subdomain is one line of tunnel config, which is also how MagLock's remote access works.

It's deliberately private — the pages it serves are my own notes and tools, not a product — so this page describes it without linking to it.

§ 04

Control panel

A cockpit for the box.

A Python control panel — about fifteen hundred lines, packaged as a Windows executable with PyInstaller — starts and stops the services, and watches processes, ports and network state through psutil. Its colours, fonts and motion were the first thing I ever designed carefully, and they turned into everything below.

§ 05

Design system

Command Nexus: a design system written as data.

Command Nexus is specified in one JSON file: colour tokens and the maths that derives them, typography, glyphs, button behaviour, motion constants, component shapes, a paste-ready :root block, and a checklist of sixteen things a faithful copy must have and nine it must never do. Because it's data rather than a mood board, any page, app or tool can reproduce it exactly — and MagLock's Flutter theme is copied from it colour for colour.

  • Void--bg · #030306
  • Primary--accent · #00ff9d
  • Info--accent2 · #00d4ff
  • Danger--accent3 · #ff3366
  • Warning--accent4 · #ffd700
  • Secondary--accent5 · #c77dff
  • Near-black void, never pure black; one monospace family and nothing else.
  • Every border one pixel and square — no radius anywhere.
  • “Glow” is colour blending, never blur; buttons invert instantly on hover, with no transition.
  • Section heads are uppercase, letter-spaced and prefixed with ◈.
  • All motion runs off one shared phase value ticking every 50ms — create once, mutate forever — so nothing on a page drifts out of step.

§ 06

Study pages

Notes that print like they render.

My study material lives on the same server as standalone HTML pages in the Command Nexus look, with maths typeset by KaTeX. A shared print kit adds one-click PDF export and print settings to any page with a single script tag — and taught me how fiddly raster pagination is: every atomic block has to refuse to split, or a PDF cuts an equation in half.

§ 07

Stack

  • FastAPI + uvicorn
  • Cloudflare Tunnel
  • Python control panel (psutil)
  • PyInstaller Windows build
  • Command Nexus design system (JSON spec)
  • Standalone HTML + KaTeX pages

Started · page reviewed

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LameCRAFT — home server + Command Nexus design system — Ali Arbab — Ali Arbab