Switching to DigitalOcean
Since I started this website, it’s been hosted on Github Pages. Originally I was
building the site using Jekyll, so this made sense at the time. As I made more and more
changes to my theme and began using more plugins, it became untenable to use the regular
Github Pages build process. I switched over to building the website locally and then pushing
that to the master branch. This works, but it’s extremely hacky and
unsatisfying to me.
I eventually switched over to Hugo, since I found the content organization made more sense to me. Since I was already using an unconventional build process, adapting it to Hugo didn’t take too much effort. But I was still keeping the source files for my site on one branch, and using another branch to push the built files.
I just switched over to DigitalOcean for hosting, and I’m very happy with the process. In a couple of hours, I was able to set up an Nginx server (which I had never done before), set up a build process that actually makes sense, and even set up SSL using Let’s Encrypt. Now, all I have to do is push the new version of my site, and it will get built and deployed automatically; in addition, all the steps in that process were configured just the way that I like them. I don’t mean to sound like ad copy, but DigitalOcean really knows their users.
We’ll be back to regularly scheduled programming soon, but I just wanted to share this small technical win. I’m very proud of it.