Wrepo

Purpose

Wrepo gives undergraduate theses, student papers, and working papers a structured place to be published and found. I wanted a credible academic repository with a clean reading experience and a small enough operational footprint for one person to maintain.

The application brings together paper submission, editorial review, searchable records, PDF access, and citations.

Publication and access

One central engineering concern was making publication explicit and enforcing it consistently. The editorial workflow controls which state changes are allowed. Public pages, search, and read-only metadata endpoints select published records and leave internal editorial information out of their responses.

File access is checked separately. A published paper’s metadata can remain visible during an embargo while its PDF is withheld from public access. That distinction keeps discovery and file authorization separate.

Infrastructure choices

The application uses Next.js and TypeScript with PostgreSQL and Prisma. PostgreSQL also handles full-text search, keeping the number of services to maintain small. Wrepo is fully self-hosted on my PC: Docker Compose runs the application and database locally, while Cloudflare Tunnel provides public access without exposing the machine directly. Alex Builds itself is hosted separately on Cloudflare Workers Static Assets at alexbuilds.org.

Uploads use a storage interface with a local filesystem driver; file delivery has its own authorization checks. Structured paper metadata, citation formats, and read-only discovery endpoints make the archive useful beyond the browser interface.

Live result

Wrepo is live at wrepo.net. Readers can browse published research, open paper records, access available PDFs, and copy citations. Authors can submit their work for editorial review.

UptimeRobot has recorded 94.87% availability for Wrepo since monitoring began on 15 March 2026.