I saw the need of a personal space where I could practice writing, share my thoughts, and create articles that would potentially help me in my career. So, I created a landing page, setup Ghost for my blog, and served it on a $5 Digital Ocean droplet.
But why not just use an online publishing service or SNS?
I think that using an online publishing service would be a better option for non-technical users and for people who want to get started writing. But if you're a software engineer, why not try the pleasure of running a server of your own?
Besides, it's a learning experience. Running my server will also allow me to put anything I want in the future, such as a demo web app for my portfolio.
Creating the landing page
I designed and built my landing page using a plain text editor, HTML, and SASS, and tested it on my local environment. I saved the source code in my Keybase and GitHub repositories.
Provisioning the server
A droplet is Digital Ocean's term for virtual machine (VM) or instance. I provisioned a standard $5 droplet with Ubuntu 18.04 (OS), Node.js 13 (Ghost and build tools), and Nginx (web server).
If you don't have a domain name, you can access the server via its public IPv4, which you can find on the Digital Ocean dashboard.
Setting up the landing page
Websites are stored inside the /var/www/ directory of the server by default. I cloned the landing page source from my GitHub repository into this directory using a deploy key, then built the final website using Webpack.
Setting up the blog
A CMS is a practical choice for maintaining a blog.
I set up Ghost, an open-source publishing platform, using their Ghost-CLI package. It seems to be a popular and modern alternative to WordPress, which also has a better user interface.
It was simple; I just followed the setup guide found on the product's online documentation.
Getting a domain name
Getting a domain name is a good way to establish and control your identity online.
I previously created a .com domain but didn't maintain it and let it expire. Recently, I found out another guy with a name the same as mine took it. So, I settled with .dev. It's also good because .dev is a TLD that only allows HTTPS connections.
I had issues linking my card with GoDaddy, which prompted me to look for another domain name vendor and stumbled upon Hover. I immediately became their customer after learning they include WHOIS privacy by default (GoDaddy does not).
For enhanced security like DDoS attack mitigation, and CDN, I registered for a free Cloudflare account and updated the nameservers of my domain to that of Cloudflare's.
Completing the setup
I used the registered domain name to complete the Ghost production installation and set up the hostname configuration of the webserver. After that, I restarted Ghost and Nginx to apply the changes.
I updated the A record of the DNS to the IP address of my droplet.
Enabling HTTPS
Websites will work on HTTP, but it is necessary to secure communications and to be able to use modern web browser features. The .dev TLD works only on HTTPS, so I must set this up for my webserver.
My best bet is by using Let's Encrypt - an open certificate authority (CA) providing digital certificates to enable HTTPS for free.
Obtaining a certificate from Let's Encrypt is easy, and I just followed this Digital Ocean Community tutorial to get one and set it up for Nginx. For my Ghost blog, I redid the CLI setup to configure the SSL. I restarted Ghost and Nginx to apply the update.
Wrap up
I usually provision virtual machines for web development at work, so setting up a cloud VM is a piece of cake. But this is the first time I tried and used Let's Encrypt for a digital certificate and set up an SSL/HTTPS on Nginx. Owing to open-source communities, tutorials, tools, and services, creating a website from scratch with just a cloud VM isn't that hard, in my opinion. That is, as long as you know how to use a search engine with the right keywords.