In an era where our digital identity is spread across dozens of platforms, having a single point of contact for our touchpoints becomes essential.
Lynx was born with this idea: a Open-source, self-hosted link manager, which allows you to create a personal page where you can collect links, profile and content, with a fully customizable design and a secure authentication system.

👉 Public Demo (resets every 15 minutes): https://lynx-demo.up.railway.app/
Credentials: admin / demo123
👉 Production: https://lynx.paoloronco.it/
👉 GitHub Repository: paoloronco/Lynx – paoloronco/Lynx-Demo

🎯 What does Lynx do?

Lynx is proposed as a self-hosted alternative to Linktree and similar services, with the advantage of being totally independent And customizable:

• Custom profile and theme → colors, fonts, layouts and styles can be defined with a simple JSON or via the admin panel.
• Secure link management → bcryptjs and JWT-based authentication, session protection with HttpOnly cookies.
• Integrated admin panel → Manage links, bios, and themes without touching code.
• Lightweight database → SQLite, without dependencies on external services.
• Flexible deployment → Compatible with Railway, Render, Docker, Google Cloud Run, Digital Ocean, and many other platforms.

The result is a responsive personal landing page, quick to set up and secure to maintain, ideal for creators, professionals and brands.

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🛠 Technical Skills Acquired

The development and deployment of Lynx has allowed us to experience first-hand different areas of the world full stack And DevOps:

🔹 Frontend & Backend Development

• Modern Stack: React, Vite and Tailwind CSS for the frontend; Node.js, Express.js and server-side SQLite.
• Authentication and security: password hashing (bcryptjs), expiring JWT, parametric queries on SQLite.
• Self-contained architecture: no dependency on external databases or third-party providers.

🔹 Deployment and CI/CD

• Railway & Render: used for quick demo and testing, with automatic database reset every 15 minutes.
• Google Cloud Run: the choice for production, thanks to automatic scalability and low costs.
  • Configuring Workload Identity Federation to allow GitHub Actions to deploy without static keys.
  • Artifact Registry to build and save Docker images.
  • Custom domain mapping lynx.paoloronco.it with Cloudflare and Google Domains.
• GitHub Actions: CI/CD pipeline that builds the app with Dockerfile and automatically releases it to Cloud Run on every push to main.

🔹 DevOps Best Practices

• Demo hardening: restrictions on password resets and data resets, rate limiting, and anti-bot protection.
• Total automation of the flow: from commit to live deployment, without manual intervention.
• Code cleaning: refactoring to remove no longer used dependencies (Supabase, Firebase).

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🚀 An Open-Source Product, for Everyone

Lynx is released under MIT License and is intended to be used and modified freely.
Anyone can fork it, adapt it to their brand and deploy it on their favorite service.

In addition to its practical utility, Lynx also represents a showcase project: an example of how it is possible to build a complete, secure and scalable product by combining modern development and DevOps skills.

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🌐 Useful Links

• 🔗 Production → https://lynx.paoloronco.it/
• 🧪 Demo (reset every 15 minutes) → https://lynx-demo.up.railway.app/
• 💻 GitHub Repository → Lynx | Lynx-Demo
• 🎥 Interactive demo → Storylane

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✍️ In summary: Lynx is not just a link manager, but a project that demonstrates real skills in development full stack and in the cloud-native deployment.
A portfolio project that combines design, security, and DevOps automation.