Instances Blog

This is a very simple blog based on flask. Goal is to serve the page within the first TCP roundtrip (around 14kB).

• using absolutely minimal css framework
• inlining most of CSS and Javascript
• using system fonts stack
• reduce http requests where ever possible

Features

pages

The Blog will render all Markdown files in the "pages" subfolder like this: <URL>/<page>.

Rename the folder "pages-sample" to "pages". (Or symlink to a separately version controlled repository for the content.)

projects

The Blog will render all Markdown files in the "projects" subfolder like this: <URL>/projects/<project>.

Rename the folder "projects-sample" to "projects". (Or symlink to a separately version controlled repository for the content.)

dashboards

todo: <URL>/dashboards/<dashboard> - statistics for the current instance.

Installation

on Debian(based) Server, using nginx and Gunicorn

Step 1: OS Dependencies

• python3
• python3-pip
• python3-venv
• python3-dev
• nginx

sudo apt-get install python3-pip python3-dev nginx

Step 2: clone project

Website is served from here:

cd /var/www/

Clone the repository:

sudo git clone https://github.com/alexladda/instance-blog

Change owner

sudo chown -R $USER:$USER instance-blog

Step 3: virtual environment

Create and activate virtual environment

python3 -m venv env source env/bin/activate

Install instance-blog dependencies:

python -m pip install -r requirements.txt

(see cat requirements.txt for complete list of python dependencies)

Step 4: systemd

Deploy to systemd:

doublecheck the paths and settings:

vim app.service

symlink said file from systemd folder:

sudo ln -s /var/www/instance-blog/app.service /etc/systemd/system/app.service

sudo systemctl start app

sudo systemctl enable app

(the file app.sock is created)

Step 5: configure nginx

vim /etc/nginx/sites-available/instance-blog

server {

       server_name <your-url>;

       root /var/www/instance-blog;
       index index.html;

       location / {
                try_files $uri $uri/ =404;
                include proxy_params;
                proxy_pass http://unix:/var/www/instance-blog/app.sock;
       }
}

ln -s /etc/nginx/sites-available/instance-blog /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/instance-blog

test configuration:

sudo nginx -t

start / restart configuration:

sudo systemctl restart nginx