raptros.com relaunched!

Announcing the overhaul of the infrastructure for raptros.com!

I've managed to replace a cumbersome and not-well-planned setup based on github pages and hakyll with a new setup based on Zola, Gitlab, and S3.

This new setup has automatic deployment as well as a preview-site setup, which means it should be much easier for me to add new content.

You can see the source code for the new site in my raptros.com gitlab repository.

goals

My key goals in figuring out the new infrastructure were:

• Automatic deployment. The previous setup, which used hakyll and github pages, was cumbersome to update.
• hosting in S3 - this gives me better control and more flexibility.
• easier generation model. Hackyll is flexible and powerful, but it honestly gave me more than I needed.

I also had some additional goals:

• Get more hands-on experience with Gitlab's CI/CD tooling.
• Practice setting up docker images.
• try out Zola

setup

Here's what I've done:

• I'm using Zola as the static site generator. I think it's flexible enough for my purposes, and I think it's both flexible enough and reasonably straightforward enough for future uses.
• I've set up some S3 buckets as static site hosts, and pointed my DNS at them.
• I wrote out a couple of Makefiles to store the build and deploy operations, i.e. make handles:
  • running Zola to build the site in both prod and staging configurations, as well as for local testing
  • performing the awscli commands that upload the generated site to the correct locations
  • constructing a docker image
• the Docker image I just mentioned is the one I published to my gitlab repo
  • it has Zola and the awscli installed
  • as well as other tools needed to be run by Gitlab
• Gitlab can therefore run the docker image, check out the repo onto it, and run the make commands needed to update the site appropriately.
  • not only does this include publishing raptros.com on updates to master,
  • but also it can deploy branches to a staging URL, allowing me to preview the generated site

caveats

one of the downsides of this move is that Zola only supports a single rss feed

• at least for now. hopefully it'll have support for multiple, custom format feeds, and i'll be able to bring back the atom feed.