Tiernan's Comms Closet

So, as you probably know, this site is built with Jekyll. Jekyll is a Static Site Generator, basically taking an input of a load of text files (see the source repo for this site on Github here) and generating a load more HTML (the static HTML is hosted on Github here, which auto publishes to Azure App Service).

In previous posts, i have talked about using the likes of Visual Studio Code and Mark Down Monster to build the site. Well, a few days back, i found Forestry.io. Its a web application which, in my case, is linked with my GitHub repo (the Jekyll source one) and allows me to make changes to the code easily. Because the way i build my site is a little different, i manually build the site and push to the destination GitHub project, but they have features allowing you to push directly to SFTP or FTP servers, GitHub, or some other options.

The interface is nice and easy to use, and you can use drafts, etc. Mind you, even with drafts, because files are written into a public repo, they are not fully private… I suppose I could just make the source repo private… Anyway, they are free for single user sites (like this) or they have paid plans for teams (say, your business blog with more than 1 user updating it, for example).

A few years back, i created a post showing you how to add an Alias to PowerShell to easily start Sublime Text from a PowerShell command line . This worked well, but this is 2017 (that post is from 2012!) and my daily text editor has changed. I have moved to Visual Studio Code for most of my daily work. It works well 95% of the time. I still use Visual Studio Pro for C# Development, but for quick fixes and work on, say Go or smaller edits, Code is great. For blogging, on the other hand, I am trying out MarkDown Monster but code still has some nice features. We will see how tests go.

Anyway, to upgrade the post, and to be able to use VS Code and MarkDown Monster from your PowerShell command line, I added the following:

Set-Alias code "C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft VS Code\Code.exe"
Set-Alias mm "C:\Program Files (x86)\Markdown Monster\MarkdownMonster.exe"

You can either run this each time you open PowerShell (a bit of pain) or you can add it to your Microsoft.PowerShell_profile.ps1 which lives in your Document\WindowsPowerShell folder. If you dont have one, just create the file, add that piece of text, and next time you open PowerShell, you are good to go.

In my case, i am actually in the Visual Studio Code Insiders group, so my alias is:

Set-Alias code "C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft VS Code Insiders\Code - Insiders.exe"

When these are set (and you have restarted your PowerShell windows), you can now run the following commands:

code filename.txt
code folder
mm filename.txt

VSCode will open either files or folders, but it seems Markdown Monster only opens files.

See what i did with the title?! Anyway, in my last post, i explained how i was building this site with Docker running on Windows 10 with the Anniversary update. Today, i am going to show you how to host it using Nginx and ngrok.

So, first, you should know what Nginx is at this stage… If not, check out their site. Next ngrok is basically a way of tunneling your localhost to the web. So, how do we build the whole lot together and serve your site to the internet? Well, this is what i have so far:

First, build your site in jekyll. for me, the command is

docker run --rm -v "$(pwd):/src" -w /src ruby sh -c 'bundle install --path vendor/bundle && exec jekyll build -s www.tiernanotoole.ie/ -d www.tiernanotoole.ie/_site/'

next, run an nginx server with that output folder:

docker run --name tiernanotoolenginx -v "$(pwd)/www.tiernanotoole.ie/_site/:/usr/share/nginx/html:ro" -d -p 8881:80 nginx

the docker container is called tiernanotoolenginx, since i could have multiple ones, and port 8881 is being redirected to port 80 on that container, but technically, it might not be needed due to the next command:

docker run --rm -it --link tiernanotoolenginx wernight/ngrok ngrok http tiernanotoolenginx:80

essentially, what we are doing here is running ngrok and pointing it at post 80 on the nginx container… you see i did not point at 8881, since we are using the continer directly… it might be different if you were not…

when that command runs, you get a screen telling you the URL of your site with some basic stats. your site is now hosted publically, via an ngrok tunnel! you could run that container as a daemon, and leave it running, but for me, i wanted to do some minor testing, so i can kill it when i want…

So, all is good with the world!

As some of you probably know (or based on the footer of the site) this site is built with Jekyll. Jekyll is a static web site builder, written in Ruby, and is a bit of a pain to build on Windows. Earlier on this year, I wrote up a post explaining how to use Jekyll on Windows using Bash on Ubuntu on Windows… It was a bit complicated, and, well, worked a few times, but was not too successfull… So, were do we go next? Well, Docker to the rescue!

I am running the Windows 10 Anniversary edtion witch has container and docker support. using the repo for this site and the scripts (specifically build-tiernanotooleie and geekphotographer.com) i can build the docker site on my local Windows machine and upload the sites as required (I host on NFSN and upload via RSync). The docker image i build from is a Linux docker image, do i need a Linux container running (and the docker tooling). I also use Bash on Ubuntu on Windows to upload using RSync. All is going well so far…