Personal Site

This is a personal website that anyone can customize and use. I created this site as a way to showcase my work, share my knowledge with others, and as a fun side project. You can see an example of the website at kyledenief.me.

Features

• Contact, About, Home, Project, and Blog pages
• Full customization via JSON
• On-site content management
• Great error handling
• Responsive design
• Searching functionality
• Polished
• Good SEO

Roadmap

After almost a year of development, I'm pleased to say that my personal website is essentially complete. I've learned a lot in the process, and I'm satisfied with the features I've incorporated. I do hope to add the ability to play asteroids in the background of the site sometime in the near future but that will be a big task.

Technologies Used

Client

• TypeScript
• React
• Styled-components

Server

• Rust
• Actix Web
• Diesel
• PostgreSQL

Other READMEs

• Customization/Configuration Documentation
• Client Documentation
• Server Documentation

Content Management

The manage page can be found at /manage on the client. For more information check out the client documentation.

Run Locally

Prerequisites

• Rust
• libpq-dev/postgresql-libs
• Diesel CLI
• Yarn (can use npm as well)
• A PostgreSQL server

Running Client

1. Navigate to the client directory.
2. Install dependencies using yarn install.
3. Start the client server using yarn start.

Note: If you change the client server port, make sure to update the URL in the .env file in the server directory.

Running Server

1. Navigate to the server directory.
2. Edit the .env file with your database information.
3. Ensure that you have a PostgreSQL database up and running (can use the docker compose file if you like).
4. Install the Diesel CLI and run diesel database setup in the servers root directory. Click here for more information on installing the Diesel CLI.
5. Bring up the server with cargo run.

Note: If you change the server port or ip, make sure to update the URL in client/src/adapters/index.ts.

Building

Prerequisites

• Rust
• libpq-dev/postgresql-libs
• Yarn or npm

Building Client

1. Update the config/config.json file with the production URLs of your frontend and backend servers, and optionally add your Plausible Analytics information.
2. Navigate to the client directory.
3. Build the client with yarn build.

Building Server

1. Navigate to the server directory.
2. Build the server with cargo build --release (note if you get error that ends in = note: /usr/bin/ld: cannot find -lpq: No such file or directory it means you don't have libpq-dev/postgresql-libs installed).

Note: Database migrations are included in the release build so they will be ran when the server is run.

Deployment

Theres no standard deployment method for the app, leaving it up to you. I personally have everything deployed on a Digital Ocean VM using NGINX as a reverse proxy. The server is run by a service on startup and PostgreSQL runs in a Docker container that is also brought up by a service. Make sure you have an updated .env file in the same folder as the release executable when it is ran. If you are having trouble deploying, don't be afraid to contact me.

Contributing

Even though I am done contributing to the site for now, if you notice any issues or have any suggestions for how I can improve the site, feel free to create an issue or submit a pull request.