Lovable Lite

overview

A self-hosted, lightweight take on AI website builders like Lovable. Describe a site in plain English and get back a real multi-page static website (plain HTML/CSS/JS, no framework runtime), generated section-by-section into a live preview with real page navigation, editable via chat or directly in a built-in Monaco code editor. Ship it with one click to Netlify, or just download the whole thing as a zip. Runs entirely on your own machine: your own Gemini key, your own SQLite database, your own files on disk, no accounts and no hosted backend in between.

tech stack

challenges

• •streaming multi-page generation section-by-section into a live iframe preview with honest progress, no flicker, no fake spinners
• •scoping chat-based edits to only the sections that actually need to change instead of regenerating the whole site on every follow-up
• •designing a versioned, parent-chained history model so every generation and edit is an immutable snapshot that restores exactly on reopen, with atomic writes so a failed version never corrupts the current one
• •keeping the LLM call and API key strictly server-side while still giving the frontend a real, navigable preview
• •packaging the whole stack, frontend, backend, and SQLite, into a single self-hosted docker compose setup with nginx proxying the API

outcomes

• •a genuinely self-hosted alternative to hosted AI site builders: no vendor lock-in, no cloud backend, output is plain static files you can host anywhere
• •one-click Netlify deploy alongside a plain zip download, so shipping the generated site never depends on the app itself
• •a clean, provider-neutral backend boundary ready to support more LLM providers beyond Gemini
• •hands-on experience with LLM-driven streaming generation, Monaco editor integration, and versioned data modeling
• •a real Docker self-hosting story: one docker compose up boots the entire app

links