My Art Blog

About time I started one, really.

Development

Recently using Drink up, Doctor!, I converted this blog site to a gulp-driven development cycle.

Read the Drink up, Doctor! README for more information on that.

The writing/dev cycle is now as simple as starting gulp:

$ gulp

Everything else can be done in the editor, and your changes will appear in a browser window automagically.

Deployment

The deployment target is my Gandi VPS, under http://art.tamouse.org.

To build the deployment distribution, stop the running gulp server, and run:

$ gulp dist

This will build the complete distribution and put it in the _dist directory, which can then be used to push to the 'deploy' branch on the remote server.

In the _dist directory, which ignored in the project root directory's .gitignore, make sure you've initialized the remote repo (should only need to be done once):

$ cd _dist
$ git init
$ git remote add origin <git@remote/path/site.git>

And every time you want to publish:

$ cd _dist
$ git add --all
$ git commit -m '2015-12-05-17-13-43'
$ git push -u origin HEAD

Then the post-receive hook will take care of the rest.

• TODO: add the setup into the .setup.sh script.
• TODO: add the push into the gulpfile.

Post Receive hook on deployment site

To make the deployment work, I have a post-receive hook defined on the remote site repository:

#!/bin/sh

echo "[log] $0"

export GIT_WORK_TREE="/home/tamara/Sites/tamouse.org/art"
export BRANCH="master"

while read oldrev newrev refname
do
    echo "[log] oldrev: $oldrev"
    echo "[log] newrev: $newrev"
    echo "[log] refname: $refname"

    echo "[log] deploying to $GIT_WORK_TREE with $BRANCH"
    git checkout -f $BRANCH
done

Remote Configuration

I have my remote site set up with [nginx] for serving static files and reverse-proxying to applications, whichever they might be. As Jekyll is producing a static site, it's quite easy to set up.

Nginx configuration

The root for nginx sites is /var/www. It is configured to automatically sort out static sites including subdomains. A symbolic link from art.tamouse.org will point to /home/tamara/Sites/tamouse.org/art, the location the remote repository's post-receive hook script checks out the branch to.

Snippet from the /etc/nginx/sites-available/virtualhosts configuration file:

    # the following matches anything in HTTP_HOST, mapping www.$domain to $domain.
    # www.example.com and example.com will map to /var/www/example.com
    # www.wiki.example.com and wiki.example.com will map to /var/www/wiki.example.com
    server_name  ~^(www\.)?(?<domain>.+)$;
    root   /var/www/$domain;
    index  index.html index.htm index.php;

I should get around to writing this into a [swaac] post...