Snap packaging for your pelican blog

This project aims to provide a self-contained packaging recipe to deploy and host your blog in production using the snapcraft pacakging system.

Building the snap

Simple as pie! Copy the snap/ subfolder and the Caddyfile to your existing pelican project, and run "snapcraft" from pelican's top-level directory.

You'll need to change two things:

• Put your website's desired FQDN in the Caddyfile
• Change the snap name to something you like and makes sense to you. Keeping the same name will prevent you from pushing the snap to the store.

Testing locally

With your site's FQDN as "localhost:8080", simply install the created snap to your local machine with:

snap install --dangerous mysnap.snap

Note: "--dangerous" is needed since your snap is unsigned (the store usually signs snaps to ensure they are not tampered with).

Deploying to production

Login to the snap store with "snapcraft login", then push you new snap with "snapcraft push".

The snap, once pushed, needs to be published to a "channel" (edge, beta, candidate, or stable). Feel free to use any mix of those for your own needs.

snapcraft release

On the target machine, login to the snap store with:

snap login

Then install your snap with:

snap install mysnap

There you go! Your pelican blog will be kept up to date. Simply push to the store form your development machine and it will auto deploy :)

Improvements

This is just a first draft of my blog server, and there's a few areas I'd like to see this project improve:

• Build caddy from source instead of downloading it.
• Checksum downloads