This is a very simple tool for publishing a blog-like site. It focuses on having ONE post on the front page, and an archive of previous posts.
There is a posting interface that supports drafts. There is not currently support for uploading files directly into the system.
All files are stored as dated markdown files with YAML headers making it easy to backup or use the content in other ways.
clone the repo
git clone git@github.com:benbrown/secret_textfiles.git
run npm install
npm install
set the config options in .env
USERS="user:password"
PATH_TO_TEXT=./text/
PATH_TO_TEMPLATES=./design/
SITE_NAME=Daily Text
RECENT_POSTS=5
PORT=
ROOT_URL=
BASE_URL=http://localhost:3000
USERS should be a username:password combo. This is what is used to login to the posting interface.
PATH_TO_TEXT is the relative path to your collection of text files.
PATH_TO_TEMPLATES is the relative path to your HTML template files.
SITE_NAME is the name of the site, used in the RSS feed.
RECENT_POSTS is how many posts you want to be included in the list of recent posts on the homepage.
PORT is the port to run the service on, this defaults to 3000 if not specified
ROOT_URL is the an optional sub-path for the site, for example blog
BASE_URL is the ROOT url of your website
start the service
npm start
this should start a webserver on port 3000 or the port you specified.
navigate to the admin page:
http://localhost:3000/secret
post away!
There are 3 files involved in the design.
design/home.handlebars design of the homepage or individual post
design/archive.handlebars design of the archive page
design/layouts/main.handlebars the wrapper content into which either the home or archive content is inserted.
CSS files and images can be put into the public/ folder.
When you are ready to deploy your website to a public URL, run the app using something like pm2. Then, host it behind an nginx proxy and make sure it is behind https!
So if you had your site running with blog as the ROOT_URL option and the app is running on port 3000, a block like this inside your nginx config should work:
location ~ ^/blog {
proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1:3000;
proxy_http_version 1.1;
proxy_set_header Upgrade $http_upgrade;
proxy_set_header Connection 'upgrade';
proxy_set_header Host $host;
proxy_cache_bypass $http_upgrade;
}