Over the last few months I've been trying to do things myself and in ways I find interesting, rather than just relying on WordPress or Laravel. I know they are great tools and I use them a lot, but I wanted to see if I could do something a little different. Like, go back to basics and write some code.
I've used some of this to make my own website (the thing you're looking at) It is intentionally really simple, I might get someone to sort out the basic aesthetics at some point but it won't go far. It doesn't track you, it doesn't require Javascript, it doesn't have any pagination, search, or any snazzy features at all really. It's just a bit of PHP, Markdown and Composer to turn it into HTML. I'll probably write a bit more about how it works at some point.
But for now I wanted to mention how it's deployed as it's the first time I've used git pages. I've been using GIT (snigger, John) for ages to a varying degree but that's pretty much always been deployed to more standard hosting.
I use Codeberg for my git service - it's like GitHub but nicer. According to the blurb:
Codeberg is a non-profit, community-led effort that provides Git hosting and other services for free and open source projects.
I opted for the really simple method of deployment via Codeberg Pages.
This fits easily in to the workflow of the generator I created which, in effect, scrapes my PHP powered local website and saves everything it finds out to HTML. With Codeberg I just created a publically accessible repo called "pages" - then Codeberg takes care of the rest. You can run your site via a branch called pages if you want, but I didn't.
- I set up a repo specifically for my finished website.
- Added a file to the root of the repo called called ".domains" and then added my domain name to that file.
- Pointed my DNS to Codeberg. I just did this with an A record pointing to 217.197.91.145 and a TXT file containing user.codeberg.page
The rest takes care of itself! I push updates to the repo every time I run generate-site and it's live within a few seconds. It's really rather nice. My generate-site function requires a bit of work as it doesn't currently automate the push, but I'm sure I can sort that out.
The documentation for this is over on codeberg.page