Finally!!!
Tech debt is one thing, but when it’s something you care personally about, it’s insidious at worst. I’ve not been doing a good job keeping this here web log updated, but I finally had some time (and some help!) to do it this weekend while at an event in San Francisco, and I’m thrilled I automated some things.
Thank Yous
I really need to give major props to Erin McKean and Tim Robinson for helping me get over the hump. Their tremendous calmness and poise helped me get out from behind the 8-ball, and helped me serve as the basis for this post, as well as what I am hoping will be more material in the future!!
The Problem
I use HostGator for my web hosting, and while I work for TEH CL0UD and could probably do something different, I’m stuck in my ways here. About a year ago, I finally got used to using Jekyll for my website, and for the most part it’s been working great. I’ve never been a huge fan of Ruby, but this definitely gets the job done.
You can always see a local mirror of this website here as well as the repo for this site here, but I wanted it on my actual domain, and I wanted to not limit myself to a GitHub page. That meant I was building my site with Jekyll on my machine…and manually FTP’ing the generated site to my host via Cyberduck…
Can't bounce any new ideas off this one...
Furthermore, I had some issue with Jekyll that made things look UGLY unless I manually went in and changed things to remove a fledgling comment line. I’m not even going to post a photo of it here, because the sooner I can forget about it, the better.
The Solution
Well, Erin was gracious enough to sit with me and point out where the bug was coming from. Sometimes, you feel dumb when you see a solution to a bug you should have fixed 7 months ago, but I was so overjoyed fixing this that I didn’t care. Still, the process of updating the blog was a pain, and I had to automate it.
Erin suggested a Travis CI job that uploads it for me. Truthfully, she suggested triggering an OpenWhisk action every time I committed a change to my blog, and using that to upload it to my host. “That would be more bloggable.” One day!
First off, curl and FTP. I tried uploading one file with curl:
curl -T file.jpg ftp://ftp.okun.io --user $username:$password
This works for one file. Want to upload a directory? Too bad. Time to furiously Google things and try them, being able to taste sweet victory not far off.
I tried some things with the find command, but largely proved unsuccessful. Then I asked a question on StackOverflow, and that’s where Tim came in. I tried his command on the CLI:
find _site -type f -exec curl --user $username:$password --ftp-create-dirs -T {} ftp://ftp.okun.io/{} \;
I can taste it! So I wrote this into a script on Travis CI, and the file ultimately looked like this:
script:
- bundle install
- gem install jekyll
- find _site -type f -exec curl --user $FTPUSERNAME:$FTPPASSWORD --ftp-create-dirs -T {} ftp://ftp.okun.io/{} \;
Aaaaaaand…nope. Code 430 errors all around - access denied. Panic. I was so close!!! But then I took a breath, and read a blog post that Tim sent me (which you can read here).
If you’re reading this, you now know that more than half of all software development is just being really good at searching for things on search engines.
A little bit more work, and ultimately my .travis.yml file looks like this now:
language: ruby
rvm:
- 2.4.1
install:
- bundle install
- gem install jekyll
branches:
only:
- master
env:
global:
- JEKYLL_ENV=production
notifications:
email:
recipients:
- david@okun.io
on_success: always
on_failure: always
script:
- chmod +x _scripts/build.sh
- _scripts/build.sh
after_success:
- chmod +x _scripts/deploy.sh
- _scripts/deploy.sh
sudo: false
addons:
apt:
packages:
- ncftp
And that deploy script? Two lines:
cd _site || exit
ncftpput -R -v -u "$FTPUSERNAME" -p "$FTPPASSWORD" "ftp.okun.io" ./ .
Now, all I have to do is commit to my repo - Travis CI does the rest, and things get updated in about a minute.
Whew! Now I have more to say here. Again, thank you Erin and Tim for your help/rubber-ducking/calmness.