blog: switching to hugo

2 files changed, 199 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/content/posts/switching-to-hugo-one/index.md b/content/posts/switching-to-hugo-one/index.md
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..c01fa7b
--- /dev/null
+++ b/content/posts/switching-to-hugo-one/index.md
@@ -0,0 +1,55 @@
++++
+title = 'Switching To Hugo: Part One'
+description = 'The reasons why I made the switch to Hugo.'
+date = '2024-12-18T07:22:35-05:00'
+draft = false
++++
+
+*This post is part one in a two-part series on switching my website to
+[Hugo](https://gohugo.io). It covers my reasoning behind making the switch. For
+the technical details on hosting my website, read
+[part two](/posts/switching-to-hugo-two/).*
+
+# A Re-Introduction
+Hello friends, and welcome [back] to my blog! It has been quite some time since
+my last post, and I thought I'd take a moment to catch everyone up to speed on
+the changes I've made since then.
+
+## A "new" website.
+For those reading via RSS, you will notice little to no change. However, if you
+point your browser to https://tdback.net, things will look noticeably
+different.
+
+Some may recall that my old website employed the use of the
+[TiddlyWiki](https://tiddlywiki.com), a wonderful piece of software that allows
+you to create a non-linear notebook for organizing and sharing complex
+information. The downside to using a TiddlyWiki as my primary blogging platform
+was the need to do almost everything in the browser. As someone who spends a
+majority of their time editing text inside [neovim](https://neovim.io), I found
+myself sorely missing my beloved [vim motions](https://vim.rtorr.com/) and the
+ability to quickly move around my system using tools such as `tmux` or `fzf`.
+In short: I missed my terminal.
+
+When researching static site generators, I stumbled across the ever so popular
+[Hugo](https://gohugo.io). I immediately found it quite compelling: writing an
+entry to my blog would be nothing more than editing a markdown file, and I
+could write scripts to easily generate and deploy my site to a web server. Hugo
+also comes with a built-in RSS feed generator, meaning that I didn't have to
+[write one myself](https://old.tdback.net/#Hacking%20on%20RSS) (although I
+quite enjoyed doing so).
+
+While I've traditionally thrown my site's index.html file onto GitHub Pages
+and/or Codeberg Pages, as a hobbyist self-hoster I'd be doing an injustice by
+not hosting the server on my own hardware. While I would encourage others to
+take advantage of free static site hosting services such as
+[Codeberg Pages](https://codeberg.page/), I've found that I quite enjoy the
+responsiblities, challenges, and learning opportunities associated with
+self-hosting.
+
+## Closing Thoughts
+So far my experience with Hugo has been great! After just a few hours I had a
+working site, RSS feed, and an established workflow for writing. If you're
+interested in the technical details of how I host my website, read onwards to
+[part two](/posts/switching-to-hugo-two/).
+
+Happy hacking!
diff --git a/content/posts/switching-to-hugo-two/index.md b/content/posts/switching-to-hugo-two/index.md
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..2b95f51
--- /dev/null
+++ b/content/posts/switching-to-hugo-two/index.md
@@ -0,0 +1,144 @@
++++
+title = 'Switching To Hugo: Part Two'
+description = 'The technical details of hosting my website.'
+date = '2024-12-18T07:31:05-05:00'
+draft = false
++++
+
+*This post is part two in a two-part series on switching my website to
+[Hugo](https://gohugo.io). It covers the technical details of hosting my
+website. For an explanation as to why I made the switch, read
+[part one](/posts/switching-to-hugo-one/).*
+
+# Hosting my website
+My website is hosted on [caddy](https://caddyserver.com), a popular HTTPS
+server and reverse proxy. Caddy automatically obtains and renews TLS
+certificates for my domains, which makes TLS certificate management a breeze.
+The caddy server runs on one of my home servers, which itself runs NixOS.
+
+## Configuring a web server on NixOS
+[NixOS](https://nixos.org) allows for reproducible and declarative system
+configurations, which makes the process of configuring and deploying a web
+server quite trivial. One benefit of running my website on NixOS - aside from
+the fact that NixOS is my distribution of choice - is that I can copy the
+configuration down to any of my NixOS systems and have it work exactly the
+same, regardless of the server it's running on. This alleviates the headache of
+dependency management and reduces setup times down to just
+`nixos-rebuild switch`, should I have the need to move my website to different
+hardware. The [nix flake for my system
+configurations](https://codeberg.org/tdback/nix-config) is tracked in a remote
+repository with `git`, making configuration changes a single `git pull` away.
+
+The following module defined in `modules/services/proxy/default.nix` enables
+the caddy service using the `caddy` package found in
+[nixpkgs](https://search.nixos.org/packages?channel=24.11&query=caddy),
+and opens up both TCP ports 80 and 443 to accept inbound HTTP/S traffic.
+```nix
+{ pkgs, ... }:
+{
+  services.caddy = {
+    enable = true;
+    package = pkgs.caddy;
+  };
+
+  networking.firewall.allowTCPPorts = [ 80 443 ];
+}
+```
+
+Then, in a separate module defined in `modules/services/web/default.nix`, I've
+created a caddy virtual host entry for my domain name. By pairing the
+`file_server` and `root` directives together in caddy, I can spin up a web
+server and host the content found in `/var/www/tdback.net/` on the NixOS
+server. I've also enabled both gzip and zstd support for compressing web server
+responses.
+
+```nix
+{ ... }:
+{
+  services.caddy.virtualHosts = {
+    "tdback.net".extraConfig = ''
+      root * /var/www/tdback.net/
+      encode zstd gzip
+      file_server
+    '';
+  };
+}
+```
+
+The server is made publicly accessible using [IPv6rs](https://ipv6.rs), which
+is a wonderful service I plan to cover in future blog posts. A few DNS host A
+and AAAA records are required to properly resolve queries for
+https://tdback.net to my web server's IPv6 address (including requests made to
+the server using IPv4!) but that's pretty much it in regards to the server
+configuration.
+
+## Writing and managing content
+The following is a nix flake I've written to create a development environment
+on my desktop for managing the content and generation of my website.
+
+```nix
+{
+  inputs = {
+    nixpkgs.url = "github:nixos/nixpkgs/nixos-unstable";
+    flake-utils.url = "github:numtide/flake-utils";
+  };
+
+  outputs = { ... }@inputs:
+    inputs.flake-utils.lib.eachDefaultSystem (system:
+      let
+        pkgs = import inputs.nixpkgs { inherit system; };
+      in
+      {
+        devShells.default = pkgs.mkShell {
+          buildInputs = with pkgs; [
+            hugo
+          ];
+
+          shellHook = ''
+            SITE="$HOME/projects/tdback.net"
+
+            new-post() {
+              hugo new "posts/$1/index.md"
+              $EDITOR "$SITE/content/posts/$1/index.md"
+            }
+
+            del-post() {
+              POST="$SITE/content/posts/$1"
+              [ -d $POST ] && rm -r $POST
+            }
+          '';
+        };
+      });
+}
+```
+
+When I run the command `nix develop` in my terminal, nix automatically creates
+a new shell environment, pulls down the `hugo` command from the specific
+revision of nixpkgs found in `flake.lock`, and defines the functions specified
+in the `shellHook` attribute.
+
+By storing this flake and my website's source code in a git repository, I can
+clone the repo down to an entirely separate machine - for instance my laptop -
+and have an entirely reproducible shell environment for working on my website.
+
+I also have the added bonus of being able to completely blow away the temporary
+shell environment when I exit out of the terminal or type `C-d` (the same as
+`exit`). This means that `hugo` and any functions or environment variables
+defined in the `shellHook` attribute are *only available when I'm in the
+temporary shell environment*, thus reducing the clutter of programs, their
+dependencies, environment variables, and function definitions.
+
+## Deployment of the site
+When I make a change to the website, the entire site can be regenerated and
+deployed to the NixOS server by running the following one-liner:
+
+```bash
+hugo && rsync -avz --delete public/ hive:/var/www/tdback.net/
+```
+
+I've placed this command in a shell script to make deployments as simple as
+typing `./deploy.sh`. This results in near-zero downtime between changes: a
+simple refresh of the page on a client's device will load the newest version of
+the site.
+
+Happy hacking!