This website is hosted on a VPS from Vultr, it is cheap - $6 a month, has 1GB of RAM, 1 vCPU, a 25GB disk and 2000GB bandwidth. Adequate for serving a statically generated site. In this post I will detail how I set the VPS up, and share how I created a deployment pipeline which uses two gitlab runners, one on my home network and one on the VPS to deploy the website. The site is served using NGINX, which is a common server, used a lot for load balancing and used for Ingress in Kubernetes. Cloudflare also provides my DNS and protection from DDoS, etc, and it’s free. I use Let’s Encrypt for a free SSL certificate and the certificate is automatically renewed every 60 days by certbot (Let’s Encrypt certs expire after 90 days, do the renew process is done 30 days prior to account for delays). Cloudflare does have it’s own certificates in front of it though, which are provided by Google.

I use cloudflare to proxy requests to the server hosting this site, as it adds protection such as DDoS and such. But if someone knows the IP address of the server, they can connect directly, bypassing the protections provided by Cloudflare. Cloudflare publishes the IP address range CIDR’s that they use on their website, but it is also accessible via an API call. Because I didn’t want to spend time typing the commands individually, I wrote a bash script, well I started with a bash script, then thought I should write it in Go, but after spending a couple hours messing around with Go, I decided to actually use bash, which was a lot easier.

I moved this blog to Hugo a while ago, which is a static site generator built on golang. Recently, I had to update the server hosting my site, but it was too far behind on updates to run an upgrade to the latest version, so I backed up my site and powered it off and created a new server. Unfortunately, my backup only had the nginx config which pointed to a container running my blog. I did have a backup of the repository which had the site content and theme, but I struggled getting it to build, but resolved it. I modified the appearance “I was using bootstrap”, and got it running locally. But I decided to switch to Tailwind CSS as it seems to be the new cool thing in web development. This also simplified my build process, as I no longer had to install bootstrapcss and gulp in my theme and run the gulpfile during development and during a deploy, it was all handled now by hugo.

I spent the past weekend messing around with Python and a couple of libraries to automate the deployment of droplets to Digital Ocean. The two libraries that I used are python digitalocean and fabric. Python digitalocean opens up the Digital Ocean API to python developers with easy to use functions. Fabric provides a way of connecting to a remote server and issuing various commands, so the combination of the two make for a great automation framework. The script I wrote, uses the python_digitalocean library to first provision the droplet and returns the IP. Then fabric is used to carry out several first time administration tasks that I do when first creating a server.

Edit: 7/28/2018 - Evolve OS is now known as Solus Project, links to the site have been updated.

I have been trying out a new linux desktop environment known as Budgie. It has been written as a desktop for a new linux distribution called Evolve OS. What is amazing about this project is that it is being developed by one person, and for a desktop environment that is less than a year old, it is already pretty stable and customizeable. It is heavily inspired by the ChromeOS desktop, but can be customized.

I have a gitlab instance set up to host my own git repositories. It is a pretty handy app, you get the features of github, but without having someone else holding your code.

I keep the theme for this website as a git repository and wanted to automatically deploy new changes once they are pushed to the master branch. Luckily, gitlab has a webhooks feature, it will call any URL you specify and send a JSON request after every receive.

Ghost is a great blogging platform built with node.js. It is what I use to run this blog. Most of the instructions online deal with using NGINX to proxy requests to and from the running node instance. I needed to use Apache, since the server I installed on already has Apache. This guide will show you how to set up proxy pass on Apache.

Getting Started

You should already have these prerequisites installed: