125 lines
6.8 KiB
Markdown
125 lines
6.8 KiB
Markdown
---
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title: "Create a static site hosting platform"
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date: 2020-07-30T01:05:00+02:00
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aliases:
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- /create-a-static-site-hosting-platform/
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authors:
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- robert-kaussow
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tags:
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- Automation
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- Sysadmin
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resources:
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- name: feature
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src: "images/feature.jpg"
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params:
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anchor: Center
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credits: >
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[AltumCode](https://unsplash.com/@altumcode) on
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[Unsplash](https://unsplash.com/s/photos/coding)
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---
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There are a lot of static site generators out there and users have a lot of possibilities to automate and continuously deploy static sites these days. Solutions like GitHub pages or Netlify are free to use and easy to set up, even a cheap webspace could work. If one of these services is sufficient for your use case you could stop reading at this point.
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<!--more-->
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As I wanted to have more control over such a setup and because it might be fun I decided to create my own service. Before we look into the setup details, lets talk about some requirements:
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- deploy multiple project documentation
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- use git repository name as subdomain
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- easy CI workflow
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The required software stack is quite simple:
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- Nginx as web server to deliver static files
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- Minio S3 as files backend
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Of course, Minio could be removed from the stack but after a few tests, my personal impression was that Minio is a way better to handle file sync and uploads instead over SSH/SCP, at least in a CI driven workflow. The whole workflow is nearly the same as for GitHub pages. Right beside your projects source code in the Git repository you will have a `docs` folder which contains the required files to build the documentation site. It's up to you what static site generator to use. Instead of using e.g. the `gh-pages` branch to publish the site, a CI system will build the documentation form the docs folder and publish it to a prepared Minio S3 bucket. The Nginx server will basically use the defined bucket as source directory and convert every sub-directory into something like `https://<reponame>.mydocs.com`.
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As a first step, install Minio and Nginx on a server, I will not cover the basic setup in this guide. To simplify the setup I will use a single server for Minio and Nginx but it's also possible to split this into a Two-Tier architecture.
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After the basic setup we need to create a Minio bucket e.g. `mydocs` using the Minio client command `mc mb local/mydocs`. To allow Nginx to access these bucket to deliver the pages without authentication we need to set a bucket policy `mc policy set download local/mydocs`. This policy will allow public read access. In theory, it should also be possible to add authentication headers to Nginx to server sites from private buckets but I have not tried that on my own.
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Preparing the Minio bucket was the easy part, now we need to teach Nginx to rewrite the subdomains to sub-directories and deliver the sites properly. Let us assume we are still using `mydocs` as the base Minio bucket and `mydocs.com` as root domain. Here is how my current vHost configuration looks like:
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<!-- prettier-ignore-start -->
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<!-- markdownlint-disable -->
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<!-- spellchecker-disable -->
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{{< highlight nginx "linenos=table" >}}
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upstream backend_mydocs {
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server localhost:61000;
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}
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server {
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listen 80;
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server_name ~^(www\.)?(?<name>(.+\.)?mydocs\.com)$;
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return 301 https://$name$request_uri;
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}
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server {
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listen 443 ssl;
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server_name ~^((?<repo>.*)\.)mydocs\.com$;
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ssl_certificate [..];
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ssl_certificate_key [..];
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client_max_body_size 100M;
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recursive_error_pages on;
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location / {
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proxy_pass http://backend_mydocs/mydocs/${repo}${request_path};
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proxy_http_version 1.1;
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proxy_buffering off;
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proxy_connect_timeout 300;
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proxy_intercept_errors on;
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proxy_set_header Host $host;
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proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr;
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proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
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proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Proto $scheme;
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rewrite ^([^.]*[^/])$ $1/ permanent;
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error_page 404 = /404_backend.html;
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}
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location /404_backend.html {
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proxy_pass http://backend_mydocs/mydocs/${repo}/404.html;
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proxy_intercept_errors on;
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}
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}
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{{< /highlight >}}
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<!-- spellchecker-enable -->
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<!-- markdownlint-restore -->
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<!-- prettier-ignore-end -->
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We will go through this configuration to understand how it works.
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**_Lines 1-3_** defines a backend, in this case it's the Minio server running on `localhost:61000`.
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**_Lines 5-10_** should also be straight forward, this block will redirect HTTP to HTTPS.
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**_Line 14_** is where the magic starts. We are using a named regular expression to capture the first part of the subdomain and translate it into the bucket sub-directory. For a given URL like `demoproject.mydocs.com` Nginx will try to serve `mydocs/demoproject` from the Minio server. That's what **_Line 23_** does. Some of you may notice that the used variable `${request_path}` is not defined in the vHost configuration.
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Right, we need to add another configuration snippet to the `nginx.conf`. But why do we need this variable at all? For me, that was the hardest part to solve. As the setup is using `proxy_pass` Nginx will _not_ try to lookup `index.html` automatically. That's a problem because every folder will at least contain an `index.html`. In general, it's required to tell Nginx to rewrite the request URI to `/index.html` if the origin is a folder and ends with `/`. One way would be an `if` condition in the vHost configuration but such conditions are evil[^if-is-evil] in most cases and should be avoided if possible. Luckily there is a better option:
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<!-- prettier-ignore-start -->
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<!-- markdownlint-disable -->
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<!-- spellchecker-disable -->
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{{< highlight nginx "linenos=table" >}}
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map $request_uri $request_path {
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default $request_uri;
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~/$ ${request_uri}index.html;
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}
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{{< /highlight >}}
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<!-- spellchecker-enable -->
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<!-- markdownlint-restore -->
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<!-- prettier-ignore-end -->
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[Nginx maps](https://nginx.org/en/docs/http/ngx_http_map_module.html) are a solid way to create conditionals. In this example set `$request_uri` as input and `$request_path` as output. Each line between the braces is a condition. The first line will simply apply `$request_uri` to the output variable if no other condition match. The second condition applies `${request_uri}index.html` to the output variable if the input variable ends with a slash (and therefor is a directory).
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**_Line 38-41_** of the vHost configuration tries to deliver the custom error page of your site and will fallback to the default Nginx error page.
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We are done! Nginx should now be able to server your static sites from a sub-directory of the Minio source bucket. I'm using it since a few weeks and I'm really happy with the current setup.
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[^if-is-evil]: [This article](https://www.nginx.com/resources/wiki/start/topics/depth/ifisevil/) from the Nginx team explains it very well.
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