Why make a blog?

It’s fun to have a little corner of the internet I get to design how I want. I don’t expect anyone to read it, but I won’t know until I make it — ahahah.

As a computer science student, my first job was planning how to build this whole site. Figuring out what to post is a later job.

Astro

Initially, I made the site with Hugo, a static site generator. However, I switched to Astro because I found Hugo clunky to customise. Astro is a superset of HTML, so I could make the site look exactly how I wanted while adding more functionality.

Web Server

I self-host this site on my K3s homelab, using Traefik for ingress and cert-manager for TLS. Given that setup, something like Caddy or Nginx would be overkill.

I went with static-web-server as it’s lightweight and written in Rust.

Nix

I’ve been trying to learn more about Nix and have been dual-booting with NixOS — although right now it’s mostly playing around with configs.

I’m using Nix more to actually learn the language. For this repo I use a dev shell to manage packages; I can immediately see the appeal of not polluting the user environment.

I also use it to package the site and create a Docker image.

# docker.nix

{ pkgs, site }:

let
  port = "80";
in
pkgs.dockerTools.buildLayeredImage {
  name = "ed-thomas.dev";
  tag = "latest";

  contents = [ pkgs.static-web-server ];

  config = {
    Cmd = [
      "static-web-server"
      "--port" port
      "--root" site
      "--compression" "true"
      "--page-fallback" "404.html"
    ];
    ExposedPorts = {
      "${port}/tcp" = {};
    };
  };
}

Building, Deploying and Hosting

Building

The docker.nix file is imported in my Nix flake.

Now I can run nix build .#siteImage to build the static site with Astro and package it into a Docker image with static-web-server serving the files.

# flake.nix

{
  description = "My dev site, using astro";

  inputs = {
    nixpkgs.url = "github:nixos/nixpkgs/nixpkgs-unstable";
    flake-parts.url = "github:hercules-ci/flake-parts";
  };

  outputs = inputs@{ flake-parts, ... }:
    flake-parts.lib.mkFlake { inherit inputs; } {
      systems = [ "x86_64-linux" "aarch64-linux" ];

      perSystem = { config, self', inputs', pkgs, system, ... }: {
        packages = {
          site = pkgs.callPackage ./nix/default.nix { };
          docker = pkgs.callPackage ./nix/docker.nix {
            site = config.packages.site;
          };
          default = config.packages.site;
        };

        devShells.default = pkgs.callPackage ./nix/shell.nix { };
      };

      flake = {
        overlays.default = final: _: {
          ed-thomas-dev = final.callPackage ./nix/default.nix { };
        };
      };
    };
}

A lot of this Nix code was borrowed from Isabel Roses’ site.

Deploying & Hosting

I already self-host a few things, like pi-hole and my minecraft server, so I may as well keep self-hosting everything.

My site doesn’t need 100% uptime, won’t get that much traffic, so doing everything myself is completely reasonable.

I use FluxCD to manage my K3s cluster. Now I can push commits to my repo, have a GitHub Action build the image, and then Flux will automatically deploy the changes.

That’s all

The site works :) I plan to add more posts and features as I go, but for now this is a good start.

There is an RSS feed if you want to follow along with new posts.