Dollar short and a day (or 1,461) late, but I’m finally bringing my old website back online. I’ve never really been one for front-end webstuff, but I am very fond of rambling so I’ve been itching to get it working again. It’s just a hugo static site (congo blowfish theme). This was originally a bit of a thoughtless rush job wherein I spun up a DigitalOcean droplet and did some cron monstrosity to auto-build the site, mainly doing this so that I could also provide some larger files/files which I did not want to commit to this repo. Instead I’ve separated the two into a files.whits.io (the Droplet where I can rsync files to) and the site itself which now GitHub pages (like I should have done in the first place).
With my final semester at UNCC drawing to a close as of this edit, I hope I’ll actually have time to commit to personal projects (and their write-ups). I look forward to being able to actually do something here!
Previous version of this blog post
There’s not much to add; for the past few years my website has just 302’d to my GitHub profile, but now runs on a (admittedly tiny) DigitalOcean Droplet running Nginx backed by Certbot-LetsEncrypt. Kinda an anachronism now, certainly reminiscent of what I was doing a decade ago. I did not want any credentials stored, and because the website’s repo is public site updates happen according to a droplet cron job. It’s not modern and event-triggered like it probably should be, but it’s simple, safe, and it works, which is all that matters in the end.
The cron job runs a shell script which does the following:
- Check the most recent commit hash of the repo
- If the most recent hash is equivalent to the last checked hash (stored in
./main.hash) then the program exits and waits to be triggered again. - If the most recent hash is different from ./main.hash, then
./main.hashis deleted and the repo is pulled to the latest commit in branch main. hugois called to compile the website into.../public/- The data of
/var/www/whits.io/public/*is deleted - Ownership of
.../publicis changed towww-data:www-data - The contents of
.../public/is moved into/var/www/whits.io/public/ - The new most recent hash is stored in
./main.hash, and the process repeats.
The script used is available on the site’s GitHub repo
It is worth noting that due to how old Debian is, Go had to be installed via backports and Hugo from the .deb from their GitHub releases page (specifically the extended version for webp support).
Yes this could just be a GitHub Pages website, but where’s the fun in that? (real reason: I forgot that existed before I was in too deep)
