kyleguy

kyleguy

There are a few things that need to be setup to have a website. One needs a domain. This is just a name that people use to identify something. Google owns many domains, for example: www.google.com, google.com, gmail.com. These domains have various meanings to different people, but to you google.com probably means a website where one can find other websites, products, services, etc on the Internet. We need a domain. We need a place for our website to exist, we are going to host our website at pebbleguy.com. We also need a way to edit our site. These three things are really all that we need, each might abstract some difficulties, but nothing is too complex. For example to have a domain we need to manage the Domain Name System, it is easy albeit esoteric.

a place called home, or maybe webroot

Base directory. Home. Root. C Drive. What other names are there? Maybe A: or /. The place that is the container for the stuff. Or the directory that holds all the files. Folders if you like that better. The webroot is a name that does not mean anything except for when you care about it. If it were your job to organize a party you'd probably pick a place and tell everyone to meet there. For this tiny amount of time that location is special. It is ground zero for where the party will happen. People who aren't at the specified location aren't at the party. Your party isn't the only party. In fact it might not even be the only party at the location that you picked. The point is that you picked a location made it special because you said it was. This is the same for a webroot. You are just picking some arbitrary location on a disk and you are going to tell everyone if they want to party at your website they need to go there. When you follow the instructions for the site setup you will need to tell NginX about this location. I am going to pick the location and we are going to put some files there to serve up at the party. How long can I draw out this metaphore? Forever.

Our webroot is going to be /mnt/external/websites/kyleguy.rome7.com. We are going to store files in an adjacent directory, further explained when we do the site setup. This directory that actually contains all the .html files and cool pictures of cats is going to be /mnt/external/projects/kyleguy/public. And /mnt/external/projects/kyleguy that is this repository. There is a copy of this README.md in /mnt/external/projects/kyleguy/README.md. Whoa trippy. Lets put this README.md there.

cd /mnt/external/projects
git clone https://git.pebbleguy.com/kyle/kyleguy

Public does not exist yet. Let's create it. We are hosting a static site generated by a tool called hugo. We need hugo. One would be better off developing their site on their computer. So let's use Windows because I loath the OS and like maximum pain.

site setup

You are going to need a domain, either buy one or be a person whom already has a domain. We are going to host our site on pebbleguy.com using the NginX ("engine x") web server. We will create a site configuration file with SSL using a tool, certbot-wapper.sh. This script is part of the pebbleguy repository. Login to your account on pebbleguy.com using Secure Shell (SSH) or ask Kyle, Chris, Daniel, or Emma for help. If you are one of those people, hello! Download the pebbleguy.com repository so you have access to the script and run certbot-wrapper.sh to have it create the NginX config file for your site:

git clone https://git.pebbleguy.com/Dan/pebbleguy.com
cd pebbleguy.com/scripts
./certbot-wrapper.sh -h kyleguy.rome7.com -u kyle

This should create a configuration file either on the external disk or primary disk depending on if pebbleguy.com is in Read-Only or Read-Write mode. More info on that here. The locations are either /mnt/external/live-server-configs/for-nginx/sites-enabled/kyleguy-web.conf or /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/kyleguy-web.conf.

Keep those file locations in mind for later.

When I ran certbot-wrapper the system was in Read-Write mode so my config was created /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/kyleguy-web.conf:

server {
        server_name kyleguy.rome7.com;
        # listen 80;
        listen 443 ssl;
        index index.php;
        root /mnt/external/websites/kyleguy.rome7.com/;

        location / {
            # first attempt to serve request as file, then as directory, then fall back to displaying a 404.
            try_files $uri $uri/ =404;
        }

        # reverse proxy for initial certbot http challenge (we have certbot listen on 888)
        # include /etc/nginx/includes/certbot-web-plugin.conf;

        # include php by default
        include /etc/nginx/includes/php-location-directives.conf;

        ssl_certificate /mnt/external/live-server-configs/letsencrypt/live/kyleguy.rome7.com/fullchain.pem;
        ssl_certificate_key /mnt/external/live-server-configs/letsencrypt/live/kyleguy.rome7.com/privkey.pem;
        # include /etc/nginx/snippets/ssl-params.conf;
}

Now we need to create a directory to store our site. You'll notice in the generated config file it has some defaults choosen for us, root /mnt/external/websites/kyleguy.rome7.com/;. It hasn't actually done any of the work it is meant only to bootstrap a config file and retrieve SSL certificates for https. If you use your SSH connected terminal to navigate to the external drive you will see a projects directory:

cd /mnt/external
ls

will show:

username@pebbleguy:/mnt/external $ cd /mnt/external
username@pebbleguy:/mnt/external $ ls
gogs  live-server-configs  lost+found  projects  websites

You will put your site repository into the projects directory. You will also notice a websites directory. You could put your website there, but you'd get caught in an organizational nightmare. Instead we will put a sort of shortcut into the websites directory that points to the actual website directory that is contained in our repository. This way we don't ever need to come back to this terminal on pebbleguy.com to mess around with our files ever again, probably.

username@pebbleguy:/mnt/external $ cd /mnt/external
username@pebbleguy:/mnt/external $ ls
gogs  live-server-configs  lost+found  projects  websites
username@pebbleguy:/mnt/external $ sudo ln -s /mnt/external/projects/kyleguy/public/ /mnt/external/websites/kyleguy.rome7.com
username@pebbleguy:/mnt/external $ ls /mnt/external/websites
emma-kac  gogs-webhooks  KingsAndChaos  kyleguy.rome7.com  shootGame  www.pebbleguy.com

repository setup

Configure the your domain registrar's DNS

This assumes you are using the DNS provided by your domain registrar. Some common registrars are Cloudflare, SquareSpace, Wix, GoDaddy, Gandi, Namecheap, and others. FYI, I listed some bad and some good ones, not a review just blasting.

Not necessarily the first thing that needs to be accomplished, but if it is done early time can be saved while the DNS provider tries to spread the word out to the internet about your domain. Add a record for the domain name. In this example we add kyleguy.rome7.com, you only add a record for the subdomain part, kyleguy. You are the decision maker for what domain points to this site. My site will be hosted on pebbleguy.com so I use a CNAME so that when people go to my site they will know where my site is located. I did not want a site at rome7.com so I am creating a subdomain:

Create a git repository

Login to your account on git.pebbleguy.com. Click the add repository button:

Then fill out the form. We will use some predefined options to template our gitignore file and have Gogs initialize the repository for us.

This is what the mostly empty repository looks like if you were successful:

Get a copy of the repository on your computer

Open powershell or cmd:

You will clone the repository to your desktop, type these commands into the powershell terminal. The output should match closely with the example. You will want to replace the clone url with your own repository https://git.pebbleguy.com/{{your_gogs_account_name}}/{{repository_name}}

cd desktop
git clone https://git.pebbleguy.com/kyle/kyleguy

With the repository cloned to your desktop successfully, you should be able to use the Windows file explorer to view the files: