I have been working hard these last many weeks in order to move all services off of my main DigitalOcean Droplet/VM. In the process, I have been moving everything to Docker, with full automation via Ansible. I have finally achieved this goal, for the web services anyway, and now I can deploy all of my web services with one or two Ansible commands: a bootstrap playbook (needed only for DigitalOcean VMs), and a deploy playbook (good for VMs at home as well as ones at DigitalOcean).
I have uploaded my code to GitHub. For DigitalOcean VMs, I start with playbook_bootstrap.yml, and for all VMs, I run playbook_blog_server.yml.
This single command now sets up everything that used to be an Apache vhost on my main VM -- and all "vhosts" now run through Traefik.
This is a good milestone to reach, because it means I have now accomplished my goal of treating these services as "infrastructure as code": I no longer make changes on the web server -- all changes are done in Ansible and/or Docker, then pushed out to the server.
Next up, I will work on moving my mail server (postfix, dovecot, spamassassin).
While working on this project, one of the things I ran into is that the Pelican search plugin I have been using, tipue_search, is no longer supported. At first, this kept my main site on Apache, but eventually I decided I needed to get this sorted. I made my own copy of tipue_search and added it to the Dockerfile I am using to build this site, and now I have it working in my Dockerized blog implementation. I had considered switching to the brand-new pelican-algolia plugin, and while I still think that is a great solution I decided to stick with the tipue_search plugin I've been using for years.
This Dockerfile uses a multi-stage build process, which I like because it lowers the requirements for my build server: the multi-stage build means that Pelican is not actually installed on my build server -- the entire build is done in a container. I got this idea from a friend, who does this with his blog.
Hopefully I will now find it easier to update this and my Atari blog.
I am a system engineer in the Raleigh, NC area. My main interests are Unix, VMware, and networking. More about me, and how I got started.