At this point I’m just building every classic web utility from scratch in Rust. Last week it was a link shortener. This week: pastebin.
Why
Same reason as everything else on this server — I want it to be mine. Pastebin.com is fine but it’s ad-ridden, has a size limit, and I don’t control what happens to the content. Running my own means I can paste whatever I want, set my own limits, and know exactly where the data lives.
The Stack
Same pattern as the shortener: Rust, Axum, SQLx, PostgreSQL. At this point I have a pretty good mental model of how these pieces fit together, so the scaffolding went fast. The interesting new piece was syntax highlighting.
I used syntect for server-side syntax highlighting. It ships with a full set of TextMate grammars and a handful of themes — I went with base16-ocean.dark because it plays nicely with the site’s aesthetic. The highlighted HTML gets pre-rendered at insert time and cached in the database, so views are just a lookup and a template render. No client-side JS, no flash of unstyled code.
The language selector is a curated dropdown of about 20 options rather than exposing the full syntect grammar list. Keeps it clean.
Features
Pastes support optional titles, a language selector, time-based expiry, burn-after-read, and password protection. Burn-after-read deletes the row from the database on first view — raw view counts too, so no sneaking a peek via curl. Password-protected pastes return the rendered HTML directly on successful auth rather than redirecting, so the URL stays clean.
Raw view lives at /raw/:code and serves plain text with the correct content-type header, which means you can pipe it directly into a shell or curl it into a file.
The admin page uses the same bearer token auth pattern as the shortener — token in localStorage, data fetched from protected endpoints. No sessions, no cookies, no overhead.
Deployment
Single binary, systemd service, nginx reverse proxy, Let’s Encrypt cert. Same as everything else. cargo build --release, drop a .env, and it’s running. The whole thing from cargo new to live was about two hours.
It’s running at p.seraph.ws.