Years back, I had deployed an instance of LinkAce on GCP. I was using this (and still do a lot) to manage and store my bookmarks I find on the internet.
Now, this version I had deployed is quite old (1.15.4) compared to the latest one (2.1.9). There are a ton of breaking changes if I simply upgrade. To make life simpler, I need to somehow backup the older instance and THEN deploy the new version.
Or do a fresh new deployment.
Goal
- Have a nice clean bookmarks manager deployed
Considerations
- LinkAce did have a backup mechanism that I have never really used. Need to backup data before migrating to new tool/version.
- Obsidian will of course act as my primary (and only) method of editing “posts”.
Work Log
2025-08-16
I’ll implement the backup on the linkace instance using a tool called https://cron-job.org/en/ that will automate the backup process. LinkAce can only backup once a job is triggered using a Cron Job1.
Cron Job is pretty nifty. Took less than 2 mins to add the cron URL given by my LinkAce instance. But it did not work as expected :(. I even went through the documentation searching for a way to restore a backup. Couldn’t find anything.
Now either I can update to the v2 version directly, and re-tag my bookmarks and all. Or I go with a new app. I’m thinking LinkDing.
Regardless of what I go with, I will still need a reverse-proxy. Coz on the same VM I will also be deploying a server for being able to share my obsidian notes without putting them on the blog. So maybe I should configure the reverse proxy first.
2025-08-19
So I’m using Claude Code to integrate LinkAce v2, hoping it would do the grunt work similar to the sharenote server.
Spolier Alert: It didn’t do that great a job.
First it tried to integrate a weird mixture of v1 and v2 of LinkAce. It incorrectly assumed LinkAce still works on PHP-FPM, which it doesn’t in v2. v2 ships with a web server, that has to be put behind a proxy.
Maybe tomorrow I’ll try again, but till now quite sad that it wasn’t as magical as last time.
But I didn’t give up just yet…
I am now installing Claude Code on the GCP VM. I will debug manually without AI over the weekend, but I wanna see how much can i stretch the capabilities of Claude Code.
Footnotes
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weird. ↩