How this blog was hosted once upon a time

Overview

This is a meta post about how to host a blog with Pelican, the static site generator, and Firebase Hosting, Google’s easy-peasy platform.

Why?

• Static pages are fast and uncomplicated
• Creating static pages with Markdown templates is more straightforward than writing HTML
• With a static site generator we can manage content with version control
• No database required
• Pelican is good at turning Markdown into HTML pages; it is written in Python, and it provides the following out of the box:
  • Themes
  • Syntax highlighting for code samples
  • Support for RSS feeds
  • etc.
• With Firebase we don’t have to think about:
  • Servers
  • Object storage
  • Permissions
  • CDN
  • SSL
  • etc.

How?

Initial setup

• Follow the Pelican quickstart
• Follow the instructions here to get Firebase Hosting set up
• Pick a theme

Project layout

• I opted for the following directory structure:

• The symlink to the theme directory (pelican-elegant) is cloned separately
  • This is to avoid some of the pains associated with Git Submodules

Firebase configuration

• Create a firebase.json file, something like:

Production

• Once you are happy with your new site, run firebase deploy
• Point DNS to the new website

Day-to-day

• Create content (vim ./content/this_post.md)
• Generate static content (pelican content)
• Test locally (pelican --listen)
• Commit (git add -A && git commit -am "Add a post about important content" && git push)
• Deploy (firebase deploy)

Notes

Some of the complexities and prerequisites not detailed here:

• Setting up a local Python development environment
• Creating a Google Cloud Platform account and hooking it up with Firebase
• Buying a domain and configuring DNS

Source

The source of this project can be found here.