cosarara.me

The other day, I was asked on IRC what did this website run on.

Let’s go from the bottom to the top. First, the hardware:

An Intel Atom (D945GCLF2) with just a power cord and an ethernet cable comming out of it, sitting on my home desk. A single 300GB disk, no raid, no backups, no SAI, the best setup ever. 2GB RAM. Since the fan is noisy, I have it set to never spin below 75°C.

Now, for the software:

• Arch Linux using the LTS kernel. I update it when I feel like it.
• Nginx, serving plain text files, and running a reverse proxy for:
  • A cherrypy (python) server
  • A hunchentoot (lisp) server

Everything is started using systemd service files. The lisp server runs on sbcl, wrapped by rlwrap, inside in a tmux session, and is responsible for http://cosarara.me/cl/archive (please forgive me for letting an implementation detail inside a URL).

The cherrypy server runs as is (service Type=simple), and used to serve this blog directly. Right now I use it to preview things before generating the actual static files.

At the time of writing, the script I use to generate the static content looks like this:

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#!/usr/bin/env python3
import os
import web
out_dir = "static"

root = web.Root()
blog = root.blog
redalien = root.redalien
tutorial = root.tutorial
pages = [
    ('index.html', root.index()),
    ('blog/index.html', blog.index()),
    ('blog/atom.xml', blog.atom()),
    ('redalien/index.html', redalien.index()),
    ('redalien/manual/index.html', redalien.manual()),
    #('tutorial/index.html', tutorial.index()),
    ('tutorial/fixing/index.html', tutorial.fixing()),
    ('bluespider/index.html', root.bluespider()),
    ('random/index.html', root.random()),
    ('dtops/index.html', root.dtops()),
    ] + [('blog/entry/{}'.format(i), blog.entry(i)) for i in range(1, 10)]
print("rendered")

for path, page in pages:
    print(path)
    fullpath = os.path.join(out_dir, path)
    os.makedirs(os.path.dirname(fullpath), exist_ok=True)
    with open(fullpath, 'w') as f:
    f.write(page)

(gotta automate that range(1, 10))

As for the pages and entries themselves, I write them in either markdown or HTML, and they are rendered automatically inside a mako template. Mako! Mako! Everything runs on mako and these AVALANCHE terrorists won’t stop me. All the code is in a nice <200 SLOC web.py file.

I guess I could use something like pelican instead, but this system is already built, it works, and it’s flexible.