jedcn.com

Notes in Passing

Nearly Free Jekyll

Overview

How to get a Jekyll generated site up on Nearly Free Speech with minimal hassle.

Update

This site used to be created with Jekyll, and I wrote this to remind myself of what it took to “bootstrap” the site. That said, I’ve since switched to Octopress. I still generate locally, and I still rsync stuff up.

Background

Nearly Free Speech is a popular hosting provider that’s good at hosting static content. It isn’t too expensive and gives you the ability to publish (or un-publish) whatever you want.

Jekyll is a static site generator.

There are many strategies for publishing a site that you’ve built with Jekyll.

Which strategy you pick will depend on your publishing platform / hosting provider.

However, if you’re using Nearly Free Speech, my suggestion is that you use straight-up rsync.

In particular, avoid the lure of using things like a git post-receive or post-update hook. If you’ve already got a local setup running the way you like with Jekyll and you don’t explicitly control the server-side environment that you’re publishing into, then it is:

  • less overall work,
  • less error-prone, and
  • easier to troubleshoot

a process where you upload your generated site.

Suggested Workflow

  • Generate your site locally, and
  • Preview it locally, and
  • Once you’re happy with what you’ve got, use the unix utility rsync to update NFSN’s /home/public with your local _site

Getting Started

Assumptions

Before you begin, you should create a site with jekyll and then start tracking it in git.

You should be able to preview this site by running jekyll --server and be ready to make this site available on the web.

You should have signed up with Nearly Free Speech so that you’ve got an account and ssh access to a box.

RSync

If you run jekyll --no-auto it’ll regenerate a fresh version of your site in the _site directory.

Once you’ve got everything you want in _site you can rsync it up to Nearly Free Speech.

Putting the two commands together:

$ jekyll --no-auto
$ rsync -crz --delete _site/ <NFSN_LOGIN>@ssh.phx.nearlyfreespeech.net:/home/public

If you put this into a Rakefile you wouldn’t have to remember the specific command line options for rsync or to regenerate the site each time:

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task :deploy do
  sh "jekyll --no-auto"
  user = 'your_nfsn_ssh_login'
  server = 'ssh.phx.nearlyfreespeech.net'
  sh "rsync -icrz --delete _site/ #{user}@#{server}:/home/public"
end

And each time you wanted to deploy you’d type:

$ rake deploy

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