I've previously written about how I run Docker at home. This infrastructure is a core component to running this site. In addition to Docker, Gitlab is the orchestrator for how I run many of my homelab services. In this post we will take a look at how I take Markdown, and with the power of Material for MkDocs, deploy the site you are currently reading.
Info
Since you are currently reading this page, you may notice that this site isn't actually running GravCMS. While Grav is a good platform, a well written open source project, it didn't match what I was looking for in my personal site/blog. I'm currently running everything on Material for MkDocs, a pure markdown based static site generation tool.
Grav CMS! It is what is powering this site! As I work my way through understanding more about Grav, I hope to document some of the issues and fun things I run into.
Today's adventure is related to the Taxonomy List plugin, a nice plugin that allows custom tags to be applied to pages.
Info
Since you are currently reading this page, you may notice that this site isn't actually running GravCMS. While Grav is a good platform, a well written open source project, it didn't match what I was looking for in my personal site/blog. I'm currently running everything on Material for MkDocs, a pure markdown based static site generation tool.
For the past few years I've been running my (mostly) inactive website via Gitlab pages, serving statically generated pages from Hugo. Static site generators like Hugo and Jekyll take markdown, join it with some images and CSS, convert it all to html, and there you have a website which can be served from just about anywhere. Small file sizes and no "moving parts" can result in a much faster and "secure" website. Of course there will always be security issues with the host, but you aren't serving content out of a database.
While this process worked for a while, especially since I don't put out much content, I wanted something a bit more interactive, not something as indepth as a Wordpress, but something a bit more involved. While I can deal with CSS, I don't want to. Enter Grav. Grav is a CMS like, Wordpress, but unlike Wordpress does't rely on a database component. All flat files.