Introduction↗
One day i read this article by Rachel Laycock, and it made me realize that I could also share a few things… so here is this blog.
I already had some articles in stock, written either for sharing plateforms or for internal newsletters at the company i was working for.
The cloud provider where this blog is hosted offers a WordPress plugin but I didn’t feel very comfortable using it. So, after looking into various Static Site Generators, I ended up choosing Astro and selected a minimal free theme available on their store: Lipi.
Setup↗
I could have used a local script to build and publish the site, but I decided to create a dedicated GitLab repository with a CI/CD pipeline to automate the process.
The main steps I went through to create this blog are:
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Take out a hosting plan for a static website with a cloud provider. For the time being I chose the lowest-tier plan. I may need to monitor the size of the site if it grows.
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Get my own custom domain name.
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Activate SSL on the provider side as it is not automatic.
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Copy the
Astro Lipirepository and create a dedicated private GitLab repo. -
Customize the original template and replace the default content with my own information. The main files to look at are:
- configs\user.config.ts
- src\content\pages\about.md
- src\content\pages\home-intro.md
- Create two GitLab CI jobs to build and deploy the website.
- The first job builds the website for production mode.
- The second publishes the entire built site to the cloud provider.
Once everything is in place, I just have to add an article/post check the rendering locally, and then push the new version to the repo in order to publish it.