How this site came to be
A co-worker was asking for some help on AWS Cloudfront/S3 in slack and I clicked on the link for the page he was setting up. I asked him what he was using and he said pelican and that it was based on Python which is the language I am most familiar with. I saw it supports markdown which I also enjoy using. He mentioned other people were using Jekyll which is based on ruby, so that was a haaaard no for me.
I figured my first post would be getting this site setup.
Requirements
My current host system is Ubuntu 17.10 so you may need to adjust this slightly.
- docker You should know
docker pulldocker builddocker runand Dockerfiles - pelican
- Make
- Time (No this is not a library or technology, simply time)
Give the above docs linked in the requirements a read if you haven’t already and you’ll be better off.
Let’s roll
First thing I needed to do was install docker.Instructions here
apt-get update && apt-get upgrade
sudo apt-get install apt-transport-https ca-certificates curl software-properties-common
curl -fsSL https://download.docker.com/linux/ubuntu/gpg | sudo apt-key add -
apt-key fingerprint 0EBFCD88
sudo add-apt-repository "deb [arch=amd64] https://download.docker.com/linux/ubuntu \
$(lsb_release -cs) \
stable"
apt-get update
apt-get install docker-ce
Then I built a base dockerfile that has simply FROM alpline:latest
With that docker container built I ran it using docker run -td {IMAGE ID}
And then got into it running docker exec -it {CONTAINER ID} /bin/sh
I started going through the pelican docs. I ran their pelican quickstart while updating my docker file with all the requirements. It now looks like:
FROM alpine:latest
RUN apk update
RUN apk add python3 alpine-sdk bash
RUN pip3 install pylint pelican markdown
RUN pip3 install --upgrade pip
For local testing I ended up with:
docker run -td -p 8080:8080 -v /home/ben/gnoinski.ca/ben/build_site/:/site {IMAGE ID}
And after the pelican quickstart I can run ./develop_server.sh start 8080 and then browse to localhost:8080 in Chrome outside of the container.
At this point I looked at CodependentCodr’s repo to see what theme he was using and realized I messed up something so basic I should be emabarresed. I didn’t have a requirements.txt for pip. I was just installing all the requirements adhoc in the Dockerfile. Fixed that, and added vim. Everytime I went vim file and the command doesn’t exist it annoys me, so I might as well fix it since vim is muscle memory at this point.
New docker file:
FROM alpine:latest
COPY requirements.txt /site/requirements.txt
RUN apk update
RUN apk add python3 alpine-sdk bash vim
RUN pip3 install --upgrade pip
RUN pip3 install -r /site/requirements.txt
I didn’t like the default theme that came with it so next I found a theme that I liked. Pelican has a list of themes. DISCLAIMER It looks like a lot of the themes listed are at specific commits/never updated. As with most free stuff YMMV. After you find one that you like you need to clone it to your local site directory the pelican-theme command requires a local path for install. I forked the public repo to my own github to ensure that it will always be available. I then added it as a submodule to my repo.
The Makefile that came with Pelican has a lot of good default options. Since I’m using docker none of it applies to me unless I’m in the container itself so I removed it and decided to create my own.
I have a few options that I can do here. I could do bash, or a python scripts, but I’m going to use Make. Make has it’s own language which I have found difficult to use at times. What I really like is that I can do make build and without any other input it will do a few other required steps first. For my terraform I frequently use make plan which first runs clean which removes the .terraform and any plans, then runs configure which does the terraform init, and then it will finally do the terraform plan.
Inital Makefile is pretty basic
current_dir = $(shell pwd)
clean:
rm -rf output/*
build:
docker build -t gnoinski.ca:latest .
dev: build
docker run -td -p 8080:8080 -v $(current_dir):/site gnoinski.ca:latest /bin/bash -c '/site/develop_server.sh start 8080 && sleep 1d'
Of course I could make the image name a variable but since this will only be used for me I’m ok with hardcoding the name. I found that if I was not in the /site folder and tried to run develop_server it errored with
bash-4.4# /bin/bash -c '/site/develop_server.sh start 8080 && sleep 1d'
Starting up Pelican and HTTP server
DEBUG: Pelican version: 3.7.1
DEBUG: Python version: 3.6.3
CRITICAL: FileNotFoundError: [Errno 2] No such file or directory: '//pelicanconf.py'
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/usr/bin/pelican", line 11, in <module>
sys.exit(main())
File "/usr/lib/python3.6/site-packages/pelican/__init__.py", line 393, in main
pelican, settings = get_instance(args)
File "/usr/lib/python3.6/site-packages/pelican/__init__.py", line 374, in get_instance
settings = read_settings(config_file, override=get_config(args))
File "/usr/lib/python3.6/site-packages/pelican/settings.py", line 155, in read_settings
local_settings = get_settings_from_file(path)
File "/usr/lib/python3.6/site-packages/pelican/settings.py", line 225, in get_settings_from_file
module = load_source(name, path)
File "/usr/lib/python3.6/site-packages/pelican/settings.py", line 21, in load_source
return SourceFileLoader(name, path).load_module()
File "<frozen importlib._bootstrap_external>", line 399, in _check_name_wrapper
File "<frozen importlib._bootstrap_external>", line 823, in load_module
File "<frozen importlib._bootstrap_external>", line 682, in load_module
File "<frozen importlib._bootstrap>", line 265, in _load_module_shim
File "<frozen importlib._bootstrap>", line 684, in _load
File "<frozen importlib._bootstrap>", line 665, in _load_unlocked
File "<frozen importlib._bootstrap_external>", line 674, in exec_module
File "<frozen importlib._bootstrap_external>", line 780, in get_code
File "<frozen importlib._bootstrap_external>", line 832, in get_data
FileNotFoundError: [Errno 2] No such file or directory: '//pelicanconf.py'
Pelican didn't start. Is the Pelican package installed?
Stopping HTTP server
Stale PID, deleting
/site/develop_server.sh: line 34: 28 Terminated $PY -m pelican.server $port (wd: //output)
So I had to update my Dockerfile to include a WORKDIR
FROM alpine:latest
COPY requirements.txt /site/requirements.txt
RUN apk update
RUN apk add python3 alpine-sdk bash vim
RUN pip3 install --upgrade pip
RUN pip3 install -r /site/requirements.txt
WORKDIR /site
Alright my local dev environment is now setup and listening on port 8080.
At this point I wanted a way to also be able to stop and remove all of my docker mess associated with the above. Updated my Makefile
current_dir = $(shell pwd)
current_container = $(shell docker ps -f name=gnoinski -q)
clean:
rm -rf output/*
docker kill $(current_container)
docker rm $(current_container)
build:
docker build -t gnoinski.ca:latest .
dev: clean build
docker run -td -p 8080:8080 -v $(current_dir):/site --name bengnoinskidev -u $(USER) gnoinski.ca:latest /bin/bash -c '/site/develop_server.sh start 8080 && sleep 1d'
Hmm make clean will error if the container does not exist. Well let’s do a little if statement
current_dir = $(shell pwd)
current_container = $(shell docker ps -f name=gnoinski -q)
clean:
rm -rf output/*
ifneq ($(current_container),)
docker kill $(current_container)
docker rm $(current_container)
endif
build:
docker build -t gnoinski.ca:latest .
dev: clean build
docker run -td -p 8080:8080 -v $(current_dir):/site --name bengnoinskidev -u $(USER) gnoinski.ca:latest /bin/bash -c '/site/develop_server.sh start 8080 && sleep 1d'
I am going to host this using Cloudfront backed by s3. I’m undecided if I should continue on with how I’m going to upload and host the site or do that in another post.
Well It has been decided.