Blueprint for dollyskettle.com beta

This is a blueprint for setting up a web site using Deno, Git and Docker.

It’s a work in progress 🚧

I’m using it to practice with new tools, and to help a family member who’s publishing recipes & pictures 🍎 🖼

This works together with a separate content repository that has tools for building and serving the web site.

If you’d like to re-use this code to set up your own web site, the basic steps are…

1. Make a copy of this repository and do the same for the content repository. You may want to make them both private. 🔐
2. Consider editing the included Dockerfile and render.yaml file. For example, you can change the region from oregon to one that’s closer to you. Another thing to consider is the disk size.
3. Create a new GitHub account that only has access to your copy of the content repository.
4. Generate a new SSH key and add it to your new GitHub account.
5. In your Render dashboard, create new environment groups, following the examples in: render.yaml. For GIT_REPOSITORY, enter a value like username/repository.git, with the path to your copy of the content repository. You can use the account and key you created in steps 3 and 4 for the other environment variables and secrets. For the known_hosts secret file, you can add GitHub’s SSH key entries.
6. In your Render dashboard, create a new blueprint using your copy of this repository. A new service will be set up for you automatically.
7. Link the environment groups you created in step 5 to your new service (if they’re not already linked), and re-deploy your service.
8. After you service is deployed, connect to it using SSH.
9. Switch to the home directory with cd ~/
10. Finish the setup process by running bash setup-images.sh
11. Build the site with bash build.sh

You can pull the latest files from your content repository by running bash reset.sh. (This will also discard any local changes, since these may be generated from the build process.)

If you want to run Git commands manually, you can set up Git for your SSH session with bash configure-git.sh.

Image file storage

Git Large File Storage is configured for the service. This will support using git-lfs if it’s also enabled in your content repository. If you have a lot of image files, you may run into bandwidth limits on GitHub when deploying the service.

Project goals

This project is an experiment to see how easily the following goals can be achieved when deploying a static site…

1. Support a large amount of images during the build step for a static site (more than 10 GB).
2. Host the images using GitHub’s Large File Storage, so that they can be easily cloned from a private repository or downloaded from a public repository.
3. Use Deno to build the site, to make local development and deployment more secure.