Hosting infrastructure changes this weekend
I’ve made a number of fun changes to how things are run around here, server-wise. The goal was to move as much as possible back to my self-hosted EC2 instance and remove some 3rd-party services while I was at it.
Here’s what happened.
I’ve moved the baty.net archive from Github/Netlify to a static site on my server. Netlify is awesome but I’m capable of managing my own server, SSL, etc. I lose the CI and CDN portions, but those right now are less important to me than keeping things together and minimizing moving parts. Plus, I get access to the web server logs this way.
I’ve replaced 3rd-party analytics with GoAccess. It’s not as easy to spot normal visitor traffic, but I do get stats on just about everything else, without dealing with a tracking script. As long as I have access to the web server logs, GoAccess should be fine.
I’ve moved my microblog (micro.baty.net) to a Hugo-based static site, also hosted on my EC2 instance. To make posting easier, I’ve set up ox-hugo so every post is just a single headline in one big org-mode file. To publish updates, I’ve created a small Makefile and simply run make deploy, which rsyncs everything up to the server.
I’ve started moving my private Git repos to my own gitea instance. Super lightweight and private. To upgrade, I just replace a single binary and restart the service.
All of the above are served using the Caddy web server instead of nginx. Caddy does all sorts of nice stuff right out of the box (e.g. SSL and pretty directory listings) and configuration couldn’t be simpler.
I have a few cleanup tasks left and some automation to build but it’s quite fun having everything under my own roof and tinkering in whatever ways I see fit.