Fri, 04 Dec 2015
How this website gets published
In case you're interested, here are the technical details on how this website gets published.
- On my laptop, there's a directory, ~/projects/asheesh.org.
- It contains a git clone of a private git repository. That private git repository is hosted on my personal server, rose.makesad.us.
- I run a git hosting app called Gogs, using a web app package manager called Sandstorm, on my server which runs Debian GNU/Linux.
- Inside ~/projects/asheesh.org there is a directory called entries. Inside that, you'll find entries/note.
- I create a file called entries/note/software/this-site.mw which contains the content of this blog post, in MediaWiki markup format, because when I first put this publishing system together, I was hopeful that MediaWiki markup format would win against Markdown. (I lost that battle.)
- I commit that file to git.
- I run make update-snapshot on my laptop, which uses Pyblosxom (a 2004-era static site publishing system that I'm happy to say is still being maintained) to convert the various Markdown files and template files into HTML. Pyblosxom uses the file's mtime on disk to generate the datestamp that you see, so I use a tool called git-set-mtime to automatically use the last git commit time as the file's mtime on disk.
- I run make deploy which uses the owncloudcmd program to push the static site content to a directory on rose.makesad.us. Specifically, it synchronizes to an instance of another app in my Sandstorm setup called Davros.
- Davros is shockingly convenient, because it contains the ability to receive files via owncloudcmd _and_ it has the ability to serve them out to the world. For this, it relies on the help of Sandstorm and Sandstorm's static publishing API.
- So when a request comes in, it hits nginx running in the Debian-ish world on my server, and nginx knows that for the asheesh.org host, to send the request to the Sandstorm service running on localhost:6080. Sandstorm then looks at the inbound request, notices it's for asheesh.org, and does a DNS lookup check to find out which _grain_ (the Sandstorm term for app instance) is responsible for serving static content for asheesh.org, finds the Davros grain, and then serves the HTML that Davros registerd with Sandstorm via the static publishing API.
- Savvy systems-minded people will appreciate that the Davros code isn't on the critical path for serving a web page.
That's a large collection of things, but I like how they fit together. And, moreover, the fact that you can see this content means that the whole pipeline is working!
