Blog Setup.

The current blogpost highlights, the setup of my blog.

Gitlab Pages.

There was nothing specific i chose gitlab pages, you could use github pages as well. Gitlab gives you a CI/CD runner that you could use autobuild your static site and push it to its pages eveytime a change is detected, rather than in github where you need to update and push the gh-pages(default branch where github looks for content)

Setup

• Pelican as the framework for the static generator for the blog.
• Gitlab pages as the host provider.
• DNS is currently being managed by digitalocean (Cloudflare is also an option).
• Letsencrypt for SSL certificates.
• Gitlab CI/CD runners (refer .gitlab_ci.yml) which takes care of the build of static content.

# This file is a template, and might need editing before it works on your project.
# Full project: https://gitlab.com/pages/pelican
image: python:2.7-alpine

pages:
  stage: deploy
  script:
  - pip install -r requirements.txt
  - pelican -s publishconf.py
  artifacts:
    paths:
    - public/
  only:
    - master

There are a bunch of tutorials regarding this on how to setup the pelican framework, point it to gitlab and use letsencrypt as well, im highlighting couple of them here.

• https://gitlab.com/pages/pelican
• https://fedoramagazine.org/gitlab-pelican-lets-encrypt-secure-blog/

Couple of key things here:

• Use public as the write directory for output for pelican, because that is where gitlab looks for.
• Lets Encrypt certs and private key needs to be uploaded to gitlab, unlike github which gives free and working ssl out of the box.
• Lets encrypt cert needs to renewed every 90 days.
• Gitlab offers api for Gitlab pages and you could use the api to write a cronjob which would do the renewing. (https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/api/pages_domains.html)

Caveats

Gitlab is improving, hope they bring something to the CI/CD runner where we could use the letsencrypt certbot to renew the certificates using the api.