🥪 pbnj 📄

pbnj is a simple, minimal self-hosted pastebin solution, focused on getting you started quickly and easily

Features · Why? · Cost · Speedrun · Not a Feature · Acknowledgements

✨ Features

• 🎨 Syntax highlighting for 100+ languages with 12 beautiful themes
• 🧹 Clean interface — distraction-free, minimal design
• 🥪 Memorable URLs — crunchy-peanut-butter-sandwich instead of x7f9a2
• ⌨️ CLI-first — pbnj file.py and you're done
• 🌐 Web interface — create and delete pastes from the browser too
• 🔒 Private pastes — unlisted pastes with optional secret keys
• ☁️ Edge-powered — fast globally, free forever on Cloudflare
• ...and many more!

🎭 Theme Gallery

Flexoki Light	Flexoki Dark
GitHub Light	GitHub Dark
Gruvbox Light	Gruvbox Dark
Nord	Dracula
Catppuccin Latte	Catppuccin Frappé
Catppuccin Macchiato	Catppuccin Mocha

🙋🏻‍♀️ Why?

Another pastebin? Really?

When I wanted to self-host a pastebin, I found plenty of options—but they were all too much. Git-based version control, OAuth, elaborate GUIs. I just wanted something I could deploy in under a minute with a CLI that actually works.

So I built this.

Why not Gist? Maybe you want to own your data. Maybe you don't want to depend on GitHub. Maybe you just like self-hosting things. Or maybe you're a little autistic like me and enjoy having your own stuff :)

What makes pbnj different:

• Actually beautiful — most feature-heavy pastebins look ugly
• Deploy in seconds with one click
• CLI-first workflow (pbnj file.py → done)
• No accounts, no git, no bloat
• Just paste and share
• Cloudflare's free tier will last you forever

💰 Cost

Now, I know some people might wonder, "This is deployed on Cloudflare, they might charge us eventually!" That's why I wrote this section. Let's do some basic math to figure out how much storage we can use:

Cloudflare D1 Free Tier:

• 500 MB storage
• 5 million reads/day
• 100,000 writes/day

Typical paste sizes:

• Small snippet: ~500 bytes
• Medium file: ~2-5 KB
• Large file: ~10-20 KB
• Average: ~5 KB

The math:

• 500 MB ÷ 5 KB = ~100,000 pastes
• At 10 pastes/day = 27+ years of storage
• At 50 pastes/day = 5+ years of storage

For personal use, you'll never hit these limits. Even if you somehow do, D1's paid tier is just $0.75/GB-month. You'd need to be running a pretty popular pastebin to spend more than a few cents.

TL;DR: Cloudflare's free tier is more than enough. Stop worrying and start pasting.

⚡ Speedrun: Get Started Under a Minute!

Step 1: Click the deploy button above and follow the prompts. The most important here is to set the AUTH_KEY because you'd need that to make the pastes. Once you've clicked deploy, it takes about 25-30 seconds and your deployment will be ready!

Step 2: Install the CLI

npm install -g @pbnjs/cli

Step 3: Configure it

pbnj --init
# Enter your worker URL and AUTH_KEY

Step 4: Paste!

pbnj myfile.py
# → https://your-pbnj.workers.dev/crunchy-peanut-butter-sandwich

That's it. You now have your own pastebin.

See cli/README.md for full CLI documentation.

🚫 Intentionally Missing

pbnj is opinionated. These features are not bugs—they're deliberate choices to keep things simple:

• No git integration — It's a pastebin, not a repository.
• No OAuth/accounts — Single user, single auth key. Done.
• No multi-user support — Fork it and run your own.
• No comments/discussions — Share code, not conversations.
• No folders/organization — The homepage is your feed.
• No expiring pastes — Your pastes live forever (or until you delete them).

If you need these features, check out Opengist or PrivateBin—they're great projects that take a different approach.

🙏 Acknowledgements

pbnj stands on the shoulders of giants. Shoutout to these awesome projects:

• Opengist — A self-hosted pastebin powered by Git
• PrivateBin — A minimalist, open source online pastebin with encryption
• Hastebin — The OG open source pastebin
• 0x0.st — The no-bullshit file hosting and URL shortener
• Cloudflare Workers — For making serverless actually simple
• Astro — The web framework that makes this possible

And to everyone who's ever pasted code to share with a friend—you're the reason this exists.

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If pbnj made your life a little easier, consider giving it a star ⭐

It helps others discover the project and makes me mass smile :)