Self-hosting a blog for cheap and lazy devs

We host our blog using solely off-the-shelf tools, and I love the stack that we use. I highly recommend it if you're looking for a stack with 100% control and are ok with some light technical wrangling (eg using Git):

- Jekyll for static site generation https://jekyllrb.com/

- We use the Hydeout Jekyll theme, you can see how it looks on our blog: http://staysaasy.com/. What you see is out-of-the-box plus ~30 lines of custom CSS.

- Git for storing our content

- Gitlab for CI/CD and hosting

- GoDaddy for domain management

We manage all of the content in Git, and push it when it's ready. It's really easy. You can even run "code reviews" on posts if you like.

Re: Self-hosting a blog for cheap and lazy devs

#5

Post by butz » Fri, May 22, 2020, 6:22 PM UTC

Netlify has a free plan and you don't have to tinker with containers.

Re: Self-hosting a blog for cheap and lazy devs

#6

Post by badatcomputer » Fri, May 22, 2020, 6:28 PM UTC

Anything that starts with "Install Docker" will not be cheap or easy

Re: Self-hosting a blog for cheap and lazy devs

#7

Post by waffle_ss » Fri, May 22, 2020, 6:28 PM UTC

This doesn't cover IPv6 - you'll also need to create an AAAA record and (presumably, not familiar w/ Caddy) bind to an IPv6 address (e.g. ::1) in the reverse proxy config

Re: Self-hosting a blog for cheap and lazy devs

#8

Post by Insanity » Fri, May 22, 2020, 6:29 PM UTC

I use github pages. Can't get more cheap or lazy than that I guess?

Re: Self-hosting a blog for cheap and lazy devs

#9

Post by thesandlord » Fri, May 22, 2020, 6:30 PM UTC

chrisseaton wrote: post #3

This seems both more work and more expensive than GitHub Pages. Hardly the cheap or lazy option. And if the author is reading - your Author link is broken.

Yeah, creating a Docker container and setting up Caddy seems like a lot of work.

Netlify, Firebase Hosting, GitHub pages, etc, all make it super easy to host a static blog for free, require zero maintenance, and are all backed by global CDNs.

My blog setup uses Netlify to automatically build and deploy on a git push using the built in Hugo support.

Now of course, there is the argument of what "self-hosting" is. Does it just mean you own your domain name and content? Or does it mean you are actually running the server? If its the latter, then sure this is a valid solution, but if all you care about is owning your domain and content I'd use one of the static hosting providers.

Re: Self-hosting a blog for cheap and lazy devs

#10

Post by stevekemp » Fri, May 22, 2020, 6:41 PM UTC

The guide exposes the back-end webserver to the public, by accident.

Instead of:

    ports:
      - "2368:2368"
    expose:
      - "2368"

The author probably just needs:

    ports:
      - 127.0.0.1:2368:2368

That way "localhost:2368" will be routed to 2368 inside the container, such that caddy can access it, but not accessible externally, as it is right now:

    $ curl -v https://sphuff.com:2368

Though of course the ideal solution would be to run caddy as another container, and link them together.