2.8 KiB
+++ date = '2024-11-27' draft = false title = 'How to Host a Simple Blog' tags = ['howto', 'tutorial', 'web'] categories = ['technical'] +++
No. I don't want to have a git repository with a million billion files that are auto generated by hugo, jekyll.
No. I don't want to use some non-official, homebrew, backwater, docker image made by some random guy that stopped maintaining the image in 2011.
I want my own dockerfile that is based on alpine or even use an image official to the framework.
No. I definitely don't want to use a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editor - I have my own local markdown editor that works just fine thank you.
All I want i one (1) - i repeat - ONE fucking goddamn configuration file for the entire site (toml, conf, yaml I don't care) and blog posts should be written in markdown.
If you are like me, read on.
Additionally, there should be community made themes available - but I shouldn't have to fucking add them as a git submodule, god damn.
The blog should be hostable through a docker image that just takes your markdown and config file, builds the static website, and serves it using some standard server
(e.g. nginx or python's http.server I don't care which, as long as it is somewhat standard - If I am managing a docker container, I will manage the networking in docker)
Ideally, the directory structure should look like this:
blog
├── Dockerfile // dockerfile to build and host the site
├── README.md // info about the repository, not a blogpost
├── config.toml // blog-framework configuration file
└── content
├── about.md // the "about" page
└── posts // actual blog posts go here
└── example.md
And then to build the site, simply build the container:
docker build .
Then you should just be able to insert the docker image into some docker-compose or kubernetes stack - or even just docker run -d if you'd like.
The point of this is that you should really just focus on writing the blog entries - not the blog website.
If you want to use this workflow - this blog is written using this approach, so see my gitea instance or the github mirror for reference.
The Dockerfile I have settled on goes like this:
FROM alpine
RUN apk add hugo git
WORKDIR /hugo
RUN hugo new site /hugo
RUN git clone https://github.com/yihui/hugo-xmin.git themes/hugo-xmin
ADD hugo.toml /hugo/hugo.toml
ADD content /hugo/content
CMD ["hugo", "serve", "--bind", "0.0.0.0"]
For now, I am just using the built-in server in hugo, but it should be possible to serve using nginx.
I mentioned hugo before, but I was mostly mad that I had to add the autogenerated stuff in git - with this approach... I don't have to 🎊!