blog/content/posts/how-to-blog.md

+++ 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 🎊!