So I recently went on a little adventure to dockerify my personal website. Among other things, I wanted to be able to run Hugo to generate the site and have it publish using a CI system.

My website used to be published via Wordpress. I was nevery super happy with Wordpress; mostly because I really felt that for a personal blog that didn’t see much traffic it was a bit overkill. And of course, it requires a lot of maintenance - security issues regularly crop up and you need to tend to it.

Hugo was attractive because you can in theory just keep everything in a git repo, and have a CI system build the html and push it to a server on build success.

So, I started going down a path that lead me to the following;

• RancherOS for running docker in a Virtual Machine

  I currently have a dedicated server that I pay for that I run KVM virtual machines with. I intend to at some point get rid of this.

  In the meantime I wanted a place to run my public website, a gitea instance for my git repos and a drone instance for CI.

  RancherOS seems ideal as it gives you a very minimal Linux environment for running Docker applications; the intent is that you just install RancherOS then manage it remotely via Portainer. Obviously, they want you to use Rancher, but I’m familiar with Portainer.

• Portainer for managing my Docker installations.

  I have a server in my homelab which runs a lot of docker containers for my home stuff; the server already runs a container runnign Portainer which I use to manage my docker stacks. I use this interface to spin up stacks based on Docker Compose files.

  The above gives me a Poor Man’s Kubernetes - basically if you don’t have the need for a fully fledged kubernetes installation with the whole fault tolerance thing, if all you want is to “run a bunch of containers” this works well.

• Gitea for my git repo management.

  Lightweight and definitely acceptable for my needs.

• Drone for CI

  I use this to build my Hugo site into HTML files that are then shipped into the container hosting the site.

I’ve also got an nginx proxy container with a letsencrypt companion that provides me with a way to load applications up on my RancherOS instance and proxy them all behind a single IP but with dedicated certificates for each service.

All in all, it’s pretty cool. When I get a moment I’ll document how I did it.

edit: Holy shit, it loads so much faster than Wordpress :-)