Static Webpage Workflow

Posted on Wed 22 November 2023 in Projects

Well it's been quite a long time since I posted. I started a new job and had to manag the whole pandemic but now life is starting to settle down. I have a bunch of ideas on projects I want to work on so might as well dust off the blog to be able to publish my projects and give some updates on what I'm working on. I figure I'd start out by publishing my workflow for how I update this blog. I use Pelican as a static site generater and host the resources in S3 and have a CloudFront distribution to deliver the goodies. I have a workflow where I write the content locally on my laptop and be able to test on localhost to make sure the page looks as I want it to look. From there, I'll push the change on my repo to a feature branch and create a pull request to the main branch. That triggers a 'test' GitHub action that compiles everything and pushes the content to a test S3 bucket that I can look on my browser and make sure it looks good in a test setting. Once I validate that it looks alright, I merge the request and the merge cleans up the test bucket and deploys the resources into the production bucket. It takes some time for the updates to propogate but I feel this is a nice and easy way for me to automatically deploy new posts and have the option to test it locally and in a test environment. Full details and template files can be found on my GitHub.

The readme in the repo goes into more detail.