New site

I finally managed to give a little more structure to this site.

I left WordPress (too much for what I really need) and tried Hugo, a static site generator written in GO and based on Markdown.

This involved a number of things:

• Being the site static it is inherently more secure for the host (me).

• I have transformed my old personal wiki (wiki.cameroni.eu) into articles from this blog, so that I can also dismiss MediaWiki. The syntax of MediaWiki is similar to Markdown and there were few articles, so the work wasn’t huge.

• Without WordPress and MediaWiki I no longer need PHP and Mysql, and I don’t have to spend time configuring and keeping them updated.

• The reduction of necessary resources allows me to host this site directly in my home, on my NAS, using nginx in Docker.

Hugo’s guide includes a handy script to perform automatic site deployment via SSH and rsync:

#!/bin/sh
USER=my-user
HOST=my-server.com             
DIR=my/directory/to/topologix.fr/   # the directory where your web site files should go

hugo && rsync -avz --delete public/ ${USER}@${HOST}:~/${DIR}

exit 0

Using this script and a Docker configuration (using docker-compose) like the following…

version: '3'

services:
 web:
    image: nginx:alpine
    restart: always
    volumes:
      - /home/lorenzo/sito:/usr/share/nginx/html:ro
      - ./default.conf:/etc/nginx/conf.d/default.conf:ro

… with the default.conf file similar to the following…

server {
    listen       80;
    listen  [::]:80;
    server_name  localhost;

    location / {
        root   /usr/share/nginx/html;
        index  index.html index.htm;
    }

    error_page  404              /404.html;

    # redirect server error pages to the static page /50x.html
    error_page   500 502 503 504  /50x.html;
    location = /50x.html {
        root   /usr/share/nginx/html;
    }
}

… et voilà, the site is online 😃 (or almost, SSL and other little things are missing, but the hard part is over).