self-hosted: A tale of migrating to my own server

Published: July 19, 2020

If you look at the first post on this site, you'll see that this site started as a series of static HTML files that I was, by hand, uploading to Fastmail via their "files" GUI.

Being a total nerd for automation, I was always on the lookout for an excuse to migrate to my own server, where I could (over)engineer a pipeline to build my static content and deploy it without ever leaving the terminal.

That excuse presented itself in the form of needing to get a VPS to stand up my hobby-project, euchre.live. If I was going to pay for a tiny VM, it was a no-brainer to move my personal site to it too.

This turned out to be a great learning experience -- getting hands on experience with reverse proxies, DNS, and a variety of operating systems and webservers (first hosted on Alpine Linux and migrated to OpenBSD). Additionally, I could self-host git repos, which has long been a nerd-goal of mine :)

I plan to write a lengthier post about the joys of self-hosting in the future, but for now, I really just wanted to give a brief update on where I landed and what the current stack is.

I'm currently running (in no particular order):

• OS: OpenBSD
• Web server: OpenBSD's httpd(8)
  • Serves the www. static content
  • Also serves https://git.alexkarle.com
• Reverse proxy: OpenBSD's relayd(8)
  • Used to send traffic between https://euchre.live (which uses a Mojolicious web server as the backend) and https://alexkarle.com based on URL
• www content:
  • 100% static content
  • No metrics, ads, or tracking
  • Posts and pages written in markdown
  • HTML generated with a pipeline of the original Markdown.pl into a small templating Perl script that I home-rolled
• Git:
  • Public repos served with git-daemon(1) over the git:// protocol
  • Push access via the ssh:// protocol
  • static HTML of content generated via post-receive hook with stagit(1)

That's all for now!

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