Description

Git-blog is a locally-run content publishing workflow with a few broad goals:

• Content should be portable (can be pulled, written, and published from a fresh machine easily).
• Content should be entirely static and CDN-hosted (very fast and serverless).
• Content should be deeply archivable.

That last point is probably the most interesting. What I mean by deeply archivable is that the full history of all published content should be published alongside the content itself; even down to iterations on content, HTML/JS templating, and CSS. In practice this means that all of the content is version-controlled through Git and a bundle is pushed into the CDN with each new post. The bundle can be used to pull down the full history at any point, and by resetting locally a facsimile of content can be rebuilt for any commit in the past. The web has become disappointinly ephemeral over time and while the Internet Archive is an incredible resource I wanted to see if other approaches could be used to achive more permanence online.

You're welcome to use and improve this tool if you like but GitHub pages with Jekyll accomplishes almost all of the main goals of this project, and is a better tool in general.

Installation

To run this project, the following dependencies need to be installed:

• https://git-scm.com/book/en/v2/Getting-Started-Installing-Git
• https://fletcher.github.io/MultiMarkdown-5/installation
• http://www.html-tidy.org/#homepage19700601get_tidy
• https://github.com/tests-always-included/mo
• https://www.python.org/downloads
• http://docs.aws.amazon.com/cli/latest/userguide/installing.html

Run the following to validate dependencies and install git-blog:

make all

For reference, my development machine is running the following:

• 2019 Macbook Pro (Intel x86) with MacOS 13.2.1
• Bash v5.2.15
• Git v2.40.0
• Mo v2.2.0
• Tidy build 8765
• MultiMarkdown v6.6.0
• Python 3.11.2
• AWS CLI v2.11.5

Usage

git-blog --help

Getting Started

1. Sign into the AWS CLI
2. Start by initializing a new blog: git-blog init example.com bootstraps a new git repo with some default assets, creates an upstream S3 bucket to publish to, and sets some project config attributes.
3. Create a new post: git-blog write hello_world will create an empty post in content/posts with some markdown metadata, fill in the body of the post and save.
4. Review content: git-blog build and then open http://localhost:8080 in a browser to navigate the built assets.
5. Publish content: git-blog publish will build assets and push to S3, if you have CloudFront configured for that bucket the assets should appear after the previous CDN entries expire.
6. It's a good idea to backup the blog's repo by pushing to a second upstream source such as Github.