Continuing the meta blog-about-blog trend I will go into how I run the infrastructure used to host this site and other small things I'm working on.
When working on personal projects I usually don't want to think too hard about deployments while still not being limited by my infrastructure. As such, this site and most everything else I put online is on a $4 DigitalOcean VPS with Docker and Dokku installed. Shout out to @sidney for introducing me to it years ago.
Dokku is a great go-to self-hosted PaaS for simple projects. It works nicely with Docker and Buildpacks to provide a simple git push deployment mechanism with zero downtime deployments. Deploying an app with SSL is as simple as running:
# On the VPS
$ dokku apps:create [name]
$ dokku domains:set [name] name.lyon.lol
$ dokku letsencrypt:auto-renew [name]
# Locally
$ git remote add dokku dokku@lyon.lol:[name]
$ git push origin main:master
After this, my new app will be hosted at https://name.lyon.lol. If I want to deploy a new version I simply git push again.
To facilitate this I've set up a few DNS records, namely a wildcard A record for all subdomains on lyon.lol
Host IP Type TTL
@ 68.183.102.12 A 5m
* 68.183.102.12 A 5m
This site is a great example of how this infrastructure is very powerful and quick to iterate with. The source is located on github. Content updates are just a git push away. I write the content, compile it with Zola and commit the whole output to the repo, at which point I push to dokku.
For example:
docker run -u "$(id -u):$(id -g)" -v $PWD:/app --workdir /app -p 8080:8080 -p 1024:1024 ghcr.io/getzola/zola:v0.16.0 build
git add .
git commit -m "Update content"
git push dokku master
This keeps it simple and low overhead to maintain.