It took some time, but I figured as I only got around to deploy the blog just now, I could use the opportunity and just document what I’m doing. So here is a blog post describing how the blog it is hosted in is built and deployed.

What this is based on

First, some thoughts for my requirements:

• I’m a developer. I experienced too much pain with wordpress, typo3 and similar CMSs in the past, so whatever I used for a blog had to be closer to what I feel confortable using.
• I like to write markdown. It’s a nice, human readable syntax that can be easily converted to even nicer HTML content.
• For WebApps, I like to use React. It’s a well maintained UI-framework with clean code structure and great extensibility.
• I am kind of cheap. I run a small virtual server with limited resources. To still have reasonable performance and a clean environment I run nothing but Docker on it.

Some time ago I listened to an episode of the podcast .Net rocks in which I first heard about GatsbyJS. It’s an opinionated UI-framework based on React and optimizes for static content and blazing fast delivery. A blog is kind of static. Sounds good, let’s go for it!

How this is built

Gatsby has a template for blogs. Using

npx gatsby new blog https://github.com/gatsbyjs/gatsby-starter-blog

I let gatsby create an instance of the blog template for me. From this template I got going with npx gatsby develop and started off with deleting a lot of files I didn’t need. I also did some changes to the style. I have absolutely no background in anything even remotely related to making things look good, so I just went with what I had in my mind at that very moment (any feedback and suggestions are very welcome). The gatsby new command did also initialize a git repository so I just had to commit my new changes. For better availability I then pushed the repository to my self-hosted git server.

How this is run

I mentioned docker before. It seems to be officially supported. I just went with the documentation and tried to get it to run. First, I created a Dockerfile in the project with just one line of content:

FROM gatsbyjs/gatsby:onbuild

Then, I could build first the gatsby project with npx gatsby build and use the optimized output from that to build a docker image with docker build -t while-false/blog . from the context of my project root. Next, I started a container from the newly created image with docker run -d --name blog -p 8080:80 while-false/blog. It worked on my laptop for localhost:8080, I saw the blog I just built. Nice!

But a blog only for myself on my laptop is a bit boring. So I went on to deploy it on my server (where you are probably reading it right now). I went for the low-tech solution first: I sshd into the server, cloned the git repo, built the gatsby project, built the docker image and spun it up behind my nginx reverse proxy (which I will discuss in a future blog article).

That’s it for a short overview. Maybe I will show some details in the future, let me know if you have specific questions.