git-blog is a lightweight CMS for publishing a personal blog. It was created to satisfy a few broad goals:
- Content should be portable (decentralized and easily manageable from a new machine).
- Content should be entirely static (friendly to CDN hosting).
- Content should be deeply archivable.
Deeply archivable means that each revision of content is published alongside its full history, including changes to 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 Git bundle can be used to pull down the full content 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 disappointingly ephemeral over time and while the Internet Archive is an incredible resource I wanted to see if other approaches could be used to achieve more permanence online.
You're welcome to use and improve this tool if you like. Here are some other alternatives you should consider which can achieve many of the same goals:
- GitHub pages with Jekyll
- Astro
- Hugo
This project currently only supports OSX due to some platform-specific bash utilities.
You can install locally by pulling this repo and running make all, it will require you to have the following packages installed on your local system:
git-blog --help This message
git-blog init <domain> Creates a new local blog repo, with some default assets
git-blog configure [-stu] Configures navigation links and AWS resources [default: all]
-s --social Write social handles for navigation links
-t --title Write title for the blog [default: domain]
-u --upstream Write AWS resource locations for S3
git-blog write <post-title> Creates a new blog post
git-blog build [port] Builds all static assets into public directory, and serve for review
git-blog publish Copies built static assets to configured upstream S3 bucket
git-blog doctor Print out system dependencies which may be missing or require updates
git-blog migrate Re-import templates and static assets
Configure the AWS CLI with a static or SSO credential:
aws configure
Initialize a new blog, this will automatically create a corresponding bucket in S3 where assets will be published:
git-blog init example.com
Create a new post, and edit its contents with your default $EDITOR if one is defined in your shell's env:
NOTE: Markdown is used as the formatting markup for post content
git-blog write Hello World
Build and view the content that was just created:
git-blog build
Commit the new content, and publish it:
git add content/posts
git commit -m "My first post."
git-blog publish
View the contents of your S3 bucket
aws s3 ls example.com
Configure AWS to route to your content via R53 and CloudFront or Amplify
Check your installed dependencies to ensure that they're up-to-date:
git-blog doctor
Change the S3 bucket or region for publishing:
git-blog configure -u
Clone the bundle from a published git-blog:
curl https://example.com/bundle.git > bundle
git clone bundle git-blog-backup