The pewpewthespells.com Website Stack

Background

This repos contains the entirity of the technology stack that runs pewpewthespells.com. It consists of primarily static content that is processed by rite using a set of rules to prepare it for being viewed on the web. This content is then served by ritual, which is a web-server powered by the Jester web framework.

Building

1. Building the Tools

All of the code is written in Nim and uses Nimble (the Nim package manager) to build both the content generator and the web framework that is used to serve content. To build the tools, run the following command:

$ nimble build

This will generate binaries for both rite and ritual.

2. Preparing Content

To prepare content for the web, you will need to create a sitemap.toml file that describes the following:

[root]
directory = "site/"

[export]
directory = "/var/www/example.com/public_html/"
base_url = "https://example.com/"
rss = "blog/"

[[rules]]
input = ".md"
output = ".html"
command = "pandoc --from markdown+grid_tables --to html5 --include-in-header=%self%/header.html --highlight-style=pygments --email-obfuscation=references \"%input%\" --output \"%output%\" --template=%self%/html.template"

There are a couple of special strings that can be used to substitute into the rule.command string:

%input%, this is the path to the input file
%output%, this is the path to the output file
%self%, this is the path to the directory that the sitemap file is in

3. Processing Content

Once the sitemap.toml file is configured with all of the content for the site, it will need to be processed by rite. To do this, run ./rite and pass it a single argument of the path to the sitemap.toml file. When processing content rite will output what files it is currently generating. If rite encounters an error, then it will print out an error message and quit immediately.

4. Serving Content

All content is served by ritual. To start serving the website content, run ./ritual with a single argument of the same sitemap.toml path you passed when running rite. This will use the sitemap file to determine the location of the exported content to serve and serve it statically.

Additional Tools

nginx

While all content can be served directly by ritual using the Jester framework, it doesn't offer many of the common features of web-servers (such as logging and certificates). To do these things, I am running nginx as a reverse proxy to the ritual Jester application. This is to enhance the security and provice a more common interface for things like LetsEncrypt.

I have included a copy of my nginx configuration file for reference to demonstrate how this works.

linkcheck

To validate that all of the links on my website are working and pointed at valid locations; i wrote a small tool to check that for me linkcheck. This software is also written in nim, and should just require a nimble build to build it once cloned locally. It takes a single parameter of a http server address to check, eg: `./linkcheck "http://localhost:5000/"

samdmarshall/pewpewthespells-com