Skiff

Skiff uses Kamal to deploy static sites using nginx with Server-Side Includes (SSI).

Understand the why and the how in this introduction video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YoabUEzpM6k

Local development

If you have a Ruby environment available, you can install Skiff globally with:

gem install kamal-skiff

Then run skiff dev to start the development server.

...otherwise, you can run a dockerized version via an alias (add this to your .bashrc or similar to simplify re-use). On macOS, use:

alias skiff-dev="docker build -t skiff-site . && docker run -it --rm -p 4000:80 -v ./public:/site/public --name skiff-site skiff-site nginx '-g daemon off;'"
alias skiff="docker run -it --rm -v '${PWD}:/workdir' -v /run/host-services/ssh-auth.sock:/run/host-services/ssh-auth.sock -e SSH_AUTH_SOCK='/run/host-services/ssh-auth.sock' -v /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock ghcr.io/basecamp/kamal-skiff:latest"

Then run skiff-dev to start the development server, and use skiff [command] for everything else.

Deploying the site for the first time

First ensure that you've set GIT_URL to a repository address with a valid access token embedded in the .env file. This access token must have access to pull from the git repository in question (see personal access tokens for GitHub for an example).

Then you must also setup an access token for your Docker image repository (see Create and manage access tokens for Docker Hub for an example).

Finally, you must add the server address into config/deploy.yml, and ensure that the image and repository configurations are correct.

Now you're ready to run skiff deploy to deploy your site to the server. This will install Docker on your server (using apt-get), if it isn't already available.

Deploying changes to production

Changes checked into git are automatically pulled onto the Skiff server every 10 seconds. So all you have to do is checkin your changes and push them.

If you need to change the nginx configuration in config/server.conf, make your changes to that file, check them into git and push, and then run skiff restart to test the configuration file and restart the server if it's valid.

Deploying changes to staging first

To use a staging server, you must set GIT_BRANCH in .env to the branch you're using for staging. Then you can deploy the site to a staging server using skiff deploy --staging, which will use the configuration in config/deploy.staging.yml, and start pulling updates from the branch specified.

Flushing etag caches after changing include files

Skiff uses Server Side Includes, which can change independently of your individual HTML files. When that happens, the caching etags for those latter files will not be updated automatically to reflect the change. You can run skiff flush to touch all the public HTML files, which will flush the etag cache.

License

Skiff is released under the MIT License.