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A hosting service for Jekyll Blogs
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MyJekyllBlog/README.md

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MyJekyllBlog

MyJekyllBlog is an all-in-one multi-user CMS and hosting platform for Jekyll blogs.

Administrators can log into the web panel and configure hosted domains that users can host blogs under (i.e. hosted-blog.com).

Users can log into the web panel and configure a blog on their own domain or a subdomain of the hosted domains (i.e. mycookingblog.hosted-blog.com). Once they have a blog, they can use the CMS features to create posts, upload media, and otherwise manage their blog.

Whenever a user updates their blog, the blog is rebuilt and deployed the to webservers. Each update is a git commit, and a history panel allows users to restore their blog to any past state.

MyJekyllBlog comes with a complete set of ansible roles to automate the installation.

Meet The Servers

This table shows a brief overview of the server types and their relationships. Additional descriptions for each server type follows the table.

Server Description Services Talks To
Panel Runs customer-facing web interface mjb.web, nginx build, store
Build Runs site builders, deploys blogs mjb.worker store, webservers
Store Source of truth - Database, Gitea postgresql, gitea panel, build, certbot
Certbot Handles getting/updating SSL certs mjb.certbot store, webservers
WebServer Hosts customer blogs on the internet nginx certbot, build

Panel

The Panel server hosts the web application that customers can use to provision blogs, publish articles, upload media and otherwise manage their blogs. Administrators can use it to check users/blogs on the system, run maintenance tasks, and configure some aspects of the system.

Build

The build server processes Jekyll git repositories into static websites and deploys the fully built website to the webservers for hosting.

Store

The store server hosts two database with postgresql. One database supports MyJekyllBlog::DB and another supports Minion. The Panel, Build, and Certbot servers all need access to these databases.

The store server also hosts an installation of Gitea so that each Jekyll blog may have its own central git repository. The panel server will checkout and commit/push to this server. The build server will checkout the repository from this server for building.

Certbot

The CertBot server handles obtaining SSL certificates from Let's Encrypt and pushing them to the webservers.

When HTTP challenges are used, /.well-known/ is proxied from ALL webserver nodes to the certbot node and --standalone is used from the certbot node to obtain an SSL certificate.

When DNS challenges are used, wildcard certificates may be obtained (and is recommended for hosts expecting many sub-domains to be made).

The /etc/letsencrypt directory is synced with webserver nodes through rsync whenever new certificates are obtained. An administrator can update and sync SSL certificates from the admin panel.

WebServer

WebServers run nginx and host static content for Jekyll blogs. When a blog is provisioned, an SSL certificate will be requested for the site and an nginx configuration file will be created.

The build servers will sync the blog content with webservers each time the blog is updated through the Panel.

How does it work?

Deploy a Jekyll blog

sequenceDiagram
    Web Panel->>+Build Server: Build jeykll id X
    Build Server->>+Gitea Server: Checkout Repo
    Gitea Server-->>-Build Server: Get repo
    Build Server-->+Build Server: Build static site from repo
    Build Server-->+Web Server: Deploy website

Installation Guide

This guide will follow my process of installing the software to run on mds-stage.com and serve blogs on mds-stage-blog.com.

I need at least one of each server type. I will, however, use two WebServers and have one on the west coast and another on the east coast. I will need six servers, and I will name them panel, store, build, certbot, web-west, west-east.

I want the database server running on store not to be exposed to the Internet at large, and I will use the private networking feature of my VPS provider to get private IPs for panel, store, build, and certbot. This means I also need to have all of those machines running in the same datacenter.

Each machine should be running Debian 11.

Machine Public IP Private IP Domain
panel 45.79.31.186 192.168.213.90 panel.mjb-stage.com
build 45.33.25.211 192.168.188.226 build.mjb-stage.com
store 69.164.204.212 192.168.216.75 store.mjb-stage.com
certbot 96.126.122.198 192.168.163.105 certbot.mjb-stage.com
web-west 173.255.249.43 N/A web-west.mjb-stage.com
web-east 173.255.225.48 N/A web-east.mjb-stage.com

Once I have these machines provisioned I lay out the information about them in the table above. I will need this information to begin writing the configuration file.

For each of these machines, I update DNS records so that the domain maps to the public IP address for each machine.

Additionally, I add two DNS records for *.mds-stage-blog.com, one A record with and another A record with. This maps all sub-domains of mds-stage-blog.com to the web servers so that they may serve the blogs to people on the Internet.

Before proceeding from this section, review the section checklist to ensure you have completed all item.

X Section Checklist Items
[ ] Provision machine for panel, build, store, certbot
[ ] Provision one or more machines for webservers
[ ] Create table with your machine information
[ ] Add DNS records for each machine
[ ] Add wildcard DNS record for each WebServer

Step 1: Machine Selection

First, I should layout the servers. At least one panel, build, store and certbot server will be needed to run the platform. One or more webservers will be needed to serve blogs.

These servers should all be Debian 11 machines. I will also need a machine to install from, which should have git, ansible, and SSH access to all of the other machines.

I have choosen to lay out the machines as follows. The private IP addresses will be used to limit database access.

Machine Public IP Private IP Domain
panel 45.79.91.170 192.168.134.89 panel.myjekyllblog.net
build 173.255.209.214 192.168.202.60 build.myjekyllblog.net
store 173.255.209.241 192.168.207.169 store.myjekyllblog.net
certbot 104.200.24.149 192.168.210.55 certbot.myjekyllblog.net
web-west 104.200.24.174 N/A web-west.myjekyllblog.net
web-east 45.79.171.182 N/A web-east.myjekyllblog.net

Each of these machines is now online, brought up on Linode with their default Debian 11 image.

Next I will need to checkout the repository and update the configuration file.

git clone ...
cd devops/ansible/
mkdir -p env/staging
cp config.example.yml env/staging/inventory.yml
vim env/staging/inventory.yml

I named the configuration file env/staging/inventory.yml, since this will be a staging environment. I placed this in its own directory because some environment specific files will be stored in the inventory directory, and keeping seperate directories will prevent file clobbering. One should pay special attention to go through this example config file and update it with details of their network. Once this is complete, the installation should be smooth sailing with ansible. I use the following command to get everything installed.

ansible-playbook -i env/staging/inventory.yml site.yml

This command took about two and a half hours to complete, it should largely setup the whole platform across all of the machines.

Step 2: Manual Steps

Now the ansible playbook has run successfully, and all of the machines are set up.

During the installation process, an SSH keypair was created. The public key must be added to the Gitea user that was setup. This must be done through the Gitea web panel.

  1. Login to Gitea on the store server, using the credentials for gitea user/pass from the inventory file.
  2. Click the user drop down in the upper right
  3. Click Settings from the drop down menu
  4. Click "SSH / GPG Keys"
  5. Click "Add Key" under "Manage SSH Keys"
  6. Type a title
  7. Paste the contents of env/staging/files/ssh/id_rsa.pub
  8. Click to add the key

Once this is done, you'll need to create the mjb organization.

  1. Click the + Plus button drop down
  2. Click "New Organization"
  3. Name the organization "mjb"
  4. Click "Create Organization"

Everything should be setup now.

Step 3: Confirm It All Works!

  1. Create a user account
  2. Create a blog
  3. Delete a post

Development Guide

MJB::Web Panel Development

As root you will need to stop the MJB::Web app from running in production.

systemctl stop mjb-web

As the manager user you can run the application in development mode.

cd mjb/Web
morbo ./script/mjb --listen http://127.0.0.1:8080

Now it will automatically reload when you make changes to the libraries and templates. Additionally, it will show stack traces during crashes and debug information in your terminal.

Jekyll

You can run Jekyll by getting into a build server and running the following:

alias jekyll="podman run -ti --rm -v .:/srv/jekyll -e JEKYLL_ROOTLESS=1 docker.io/jekyll/jekyll jekyll"

Once you've done that, jekyll command will work.

Operations Guide