rsty.me - personal w3bsite

After my yearly lease came up for my VPS service, I decided to move providers and ended up going with AWS. I also did not want to use Wordpress anymore and liked the idea of static site generators and with some thought, I chose Jekyll. Since I was not using GitHub pages, I wanted an alternative way to have my site re-generated every time I have a successful git push. This leaded me to my next few choices:

Run my blog on Docker

To respawn a site after every change, made docker seem like a perfect choice and I had some experience with it already. After I had created my site in Jekyll, I gathered all the dependencies and needs to run it in docker....

Use nginx for control

Using just Jekyll, leaves you with a working static www root but no control for rewrites/redirects or custom magic. And no offense to Jekyll, it does a great job with static site generation but you should serve it a real web server. Jekyll does support dumping the site content into a folder, which makes it very compatible with nginx or apache

the configuration

I worked with Jekyll locally and created a template I admired, which started from martin308's left-stripe theme and made a handful or modificiations to make it work for me. These modifications included category support, social share buttons, a complete color theme change, and a few others.

After my testing, I had come up with a solid config, my Dockerfile below:

############################################################
# Dockerfile to build Nginx Jekyll blog
# ~ on Ubuntu ~
############################################################

###################################
# Set the base image to Ubuntu
###################################
FROM ubuntu:latest

###################################
# File Author / Maintainer
###################################
MAINTAINER Nick Reese [email protected]

###################################
# Update the repository
###################################
RUN apt-get update

##################################
# Download and Install utilities
###################################
RUN apt-get install -y curl bc apt-transport-https

###################################
# Download and install dev
###################################
RUN apt-get install -y rubygems ruby-dev gcc make
RUN gem install jekyll rouge kramdown git zip

###################################
# Download and Install Services
###################################
RUN apt-get install -y nginx nginx-extras 

###################################
# Copy a configuration files
###################################
RUN mkdir /srv/site-repo/
ADD . /srv/site-repo/

####################################
# nginx
####################################
RUN mkdir /etc/nginx/ssl

ADD etc/nginx/nginx.conf        /etc/nginx/
ADD etc/nginx/ssl/self-signed.crt /etc/nginx/ssl/
ADD etc/nginx/ssl/self-signed.key /etc/nginx/ssl/
ADD etc/nginx/conf.d/common.conf  /etc/nginx/conf.d/

ADD etc/nginx/sites-available/rsty.me                   /etc/nginx/sites-available/
ADD etc/nginx/sites-available/blog.rsty.me                   /etc/nginx/sites-available/

RUN ln -s /etc/nginx/sites-available/rsty.me         /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/
RUN ln -s /etc/nginx/sites-available/blog.rsty.me         /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/

RUN mkdir /var/www/blog.rsty.me
RUN jekyll build -s /srv/site-repo/ -d /var/www/blog.rsty.me/

RUN rm /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/default

###################################
# Expose ports
###################################
RUN rm -rf /usr/share/nginx/html

EXPOSE 80
EXPOSE 443

###################################
# Add build scripts
###################################
ADD run/services /run/
RUN chmod +x /run/services

###################################
# START SERVICES
###################################
CMD /run/services

The above configuration does a few things:

Sets the base image to Ubuntu 15.10
Updates the image and installs my dependencies
Copies my complete repository to the container
Copies my nginx configs to the container
Creates the www root and runs Jekyll using my copied repository files as source and www root as destination
Expose ports 80 and 443
Start my services script, which basically just start nginx

So this gets my blog up and running but I would need to manually build and run my docker images. I want to push them to my private BitBucket repo and automatically restart my container with the new content. To do this, I need to have BitBucket communicate to the DockerHub and DockerHub relay a successful build notification to my server. This is the fun part :)

the automagical devopsy stuff

After having my docker/nginx/jekyll work completed, I needed to create a workflow for comitting changes and triggering automatic builds. Having all my BitBucket repo pushes trigger a DockerHub build was pretty simple to set up. Now I needed an endpoint for DockerHub to send towards, after a successful build. After some searching, I found captainhook, a nice project by bketelsen which is a web listener that can run scripts based on the URL called, aka "webhook."

However, captainhook does not run over SSL, so I recommend having nginx running to forward requests to captainhook, which is how I set mine up (SSL reverse proxy). Also, run captainhook in cron so that it never dies or alternatively, use supervisord.

* * * * * pidof captainhook || /home/ec2-user/go/bin/captainhook -configdir /home/ec2-user/caphook &

This ensures that if captainhook has a hiccuup and dies, it will start again under a different PID. My configuration for restarting my docker containers looks like this:

update-docker.json

{
    "scripts": [
        {
            "command": "/home/ec2-user/caphook/update-docker.sh",
            "args": [
                "NULL"
            ]
        }
    ]
}

update-docker.sh

!/bin/bash

DOCKER_CURRENT=$(docker ps -a | egrep -i 'myrepo\/blog:latest' | awk '{ print $1}')
OLD_IMAGES=$(docker images | egrep -vi '(myrepo\/blog|REPO)' | awk '{ print $3}')

docker pull myrepo/blog
docker kill $DOCKER_CURRENT
docker rm $DOCKER_CURRENT
docker run -d -p 80:80 -p 443:443 myrepo/blog:latest

# cleanup
docker rmi $OLD_IMAGES

My ultimate workflow

Test my content changes locally with Jekyll using jekyll --serve
If satisfied, I delete the temp Jekyll _site destination directory and git commit & git push

That sums it up! Let me know what you think!

Moved blog to jekyll on nginx on docker

the configuration

the automagical devopsy stuff

My ultimate workflow