What is it?

It's a blog deploy&cms system to automate plumber works and post my fancy hacks!

Visit my blog

Some thoughts

It's year 2018, I did not expect this hard to set up a simple blog. It's like gluing a bunch of slippery stuff. There're lots of steps to make sure the glue is tight and tidy. So I guess this is what a web dev does -- putting things together and make it work. I wrote this md and some bash scripts to record every step i did for gluing things. I hope you may set up your own ghost+isso blog system by following my steps.

Things I choose to use

stacks: docker, docker-compose, nginx, ghost, isso

Although wordpress is easy to use, but I'm not familiar with PHP. Instead I try to use it's modern nodejs alternative -- ghost. But ghost is not the subsitition of wordpress, it does not have many feature integrated, such as a comment system. I don't like the idea of using a 3rd party comment system like Discord. They're usually slow to lauch, and who knows what they will do to your site. Weirdly, as for self-host comment systems, there are little choice. Isso is one of them. But integrating Isso is really crazy, so I need to use docker to automate some steps and make them work together, once and for all.

Deploy in development ENV

docker-compose -f docker-compose.dev.yml up --build

Deploy in production ENV

1. Manual steps before running the init.sh automated script: (for setting up vm/domain/dns)

• 1. create a new vm on GCP
• 2. set up ssh-key config:
     • client$ cat ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub | pbcopy , which will copy your client pubkey to clipboard. then you ssh to the server
     • server$ vim ~/.ssh/authorized_keys, which will create a new file, and paste the pubkey.
     • GCP_console > metadata > ssh keys > paste your client pubkey into it
     • mind for \n !!! ; And in both server and console, change pubkey's last field from client's username to server's username (you can check them by echo $USER) some reference
• 3. buy a domain at godaddy, and set the domain name server to (at domain management panel) asa.ns.cloudflare.com jerry.ns.cloudflare.com
• 4. add site to cloudflare (for dns&cdn), in dns panel add record, then wait for dns update. once dns updated, in crypto panel turn off ssl, turn off automatic-https-rewrite
• 5. apply for a SMTP key (for isso to work properly) in any mail service

2. Download and run init.sh

server$

wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/nendonerd/nendoBlog/master/tasks/init.sh
sudo chmod 777 init.sh
./init.sh

3. Fill some environment variables in .env template

server$

cd nendoBlog/
vim .env

The stuff with asterisk(*) is things you must fill in. (fill the SMTP key in SMTP_PASSWORD field)

4. Start it up

server$

# cd into nendoBlog/
sudo docker-compose -up --build

5. Turn on strict ssl policy

Cloudflare -> crypto panel -> ssl: full; automatic-https-rewrite: true;

How to Shutdown:

docker-compose down or sudo docker-compose down

Todo List:

• fix url issues
• add https support
• auto backup(sync) ghost/content & isso/db/comments.db to local
• auto add isso script for both dev & prod env
• make a vscode plugin to upload md files to ghost(should auto compress img and upload them too)
• rebuild a fully customized frontend using gatsby
• create a mask for guiding wechat user to open in browser
• learn handlebar and modify the theme
• make a todo list tool for the blog
• make some logo