/masochist

⛓ Website infrastructure for over-engineers

Primary LanguageHackMIT LicenseMIT

What

This repo contains the source code and content for my website at wincent.com.

Content is authored in plain-text-friendly markup formats like Markdown and served using a dynamic stack (described below). New code can be deployed and content added or updated via git push.

Stack

  • React: Declarative, component-oriented view layer.
  • Relay: Declarative data-management.
  • GraphQL: Hierarchical data querying language, type system and server.
  • Git: Main content storage.
  • Redis: Indexing and caching.
  • memcached: Ephemeral caching.

Supporting tools and technologies:

  • Markdown: Preferred content markup.
  • Vim: Content editing.
  • Marked 2: Local content previewing.

Questions

Why not use a static site generator?

A static site generator would very much be the right tool for this job, however, building the site on a custom React/Relay/GraphQL stack was much more fun, so I did that instead.

Why the name "Masochist"?

Please see the introductory blog post, "Introducing Masochist".

Development

Quickstart

Prerequisites

brew install git memcached redis

Webpack-based hot-loading workflow

git clone https://github.com/wincent/masochist.git
cd masochist
yarn
yarn update-schema
yarn update-indices # Whenever content changes.
yarn start

Running in production-like environment

yarn run build # Builds files under `dist/`.
yarn start-prod

Running in production

export NODE_ENV=production
yarn
yarn build
node dist/bin/updateIndices.js # Whenever content changes.
node dist/server/main.js

Configuration

In __DEV__, Masochist will look for content in the current repo (ie. .).

In production, it expects to find a content repo at /srv/masochist/content.

In __DEV__, you can override this with npm config set. For example, in my local development environment, I have the Masochist Git repo checked out in one folder, and a second copy of it with the content branch checked out within it (using git-worktree) at ./content (see below for more details on this set-up). I can override the __DEV__ default of . with:

# Use npm, not yarn, for this:
npm config set masochist:content-repo './content'

Deployment cheatsheet

You could do this in any number of ways but the way I'm doing it is using two local repositories as follows:

Local "masochist" repository

Structure
  • main branch checked out.
  • origin remote pointing at git.wincent.com.
  • github remote pointing at GitHub.
  • masochist remote set up to do Heroku-style deploy-on-push, pointing at an Amazon EC2 instance configured using Ansible.
  • content remote set up to do a Heroku-style update-on-push for content changes, pointing at the corresponding repository on EC2.
Commands
$ git push masochist main # Deploy app (after initial provisioning).
$ git push masochist # Subsequent deployments.
$ git push origin # Propagate code, but no deploy.
$ git push # Shorthand for `git push origin`.
$ git push github # If you can't be bothered waiting for it to auto-replicate.

Local "content" worktree

Structure
  • content branch checked out.
  • content remote configured to do Heroku-style push-to-publish.
  • origin remote pointing at git.wincent.com.
  • github remote pointing at GitHub.
Commands
$ git push content content # First push after initial provisioning.
$ git push content # Subsequent pushes.
$ git config branch.content.merge refs/heads/content # For laziness.
$ git push # Simple.
Rollback to a prior rev $HASH
$ git push masochist +$HASH:main

Or just switch symlinks and sudo monit restart masochist.

Force a deploy without actual code changes

$ git commit -m Deploy --allow-empty
$ git push masochist