As we mentioned in our last post, we plan to share aspects of how we moved to Jekyll. This is the first of these posts.

Background

With a database-based solution, updating is easy; when the user updates content through the user interface, the new content is served when the page or post is requested. However, with a static site, an “update” is technically any change to the underlying files from which the site is generated. Typically, though, this is marked by source control commit and push to a master repository. GitHub Pages, the product for which Jekyll was developed, uses this as a flag to regenerate the site. We weren't using GitHub*, though - we were using Mercurial (Hg) for our source code control, with the master repository on a different server than the one from which the site is served.

* There were a few reasons we did not wish to host our sites using GitHub, none of which are pertinent to how this works.

Options

With the need to regenerate the site after each site's master repository receives a push, there were a few different options we considered.

1. When a push occurs, regenerate the site on the Hg server, then use scp to delete the old files from and copy the new files to the web server.
2. Set up a sandbox on the Hg server that updates and regenerates each time a push occurs, and run rsync on the web server to check for updates every so often.
3. When a push occurs, notify the web server, and have it regenerate the site.

The first option has the potential to run afoul of SSH rate limits, plus has the potential to require much more data transfer than option 3. The second option had the advantage of running a process local to the Hg server, but would have required disk space utilization that we didn't really need; and, as Jekyll regenerates all the pages in a site, rsync would have likely ended up transferring all the data for every update anyway, losing one of its benefits. The third option required Jekyll to be installed on the web server, and uses it for processing, potentially taking cycles that could be used to serve web pages.

Eventually, we decided to go with option 3.

Script All the Things

On the Hg server, in the master repository for each site, we put the following in .hg/hgrc (the following examples are for this site):

[hooks]
incoming = /opt/jobs/notify.tech-blog.sh

...and then, notify.tech-blog.sh…

#!/bin/bash
ssh user@web.server touch /opt/jobs/jekyll/.tech-blog

That is the only logic required on the Hg server. Now, over on the web server, we need logic to regenerate the site and make it live. Since we have multiple sites, we wrote a script that has a few variables, so it could be duplicated for other sites. The following is tech-blog.sh:

##
## DJS Consulting Tech Blog Jekyll Build Script
##
## This will check out, build, and replace a Jekyll-generated site. Just update
## the parts under the "Env" heading for the specific site.
##

## Env
REPO=jekyll.tech-blog
DEST=/path/to/public/techblog
TRIGGER=.tech-blog
## /Env

cd /opt/jobs/jekyll

if [ -e $TRIGGER ]
then
  rm $TRIGGER

  ## Check out the site and build it
  hg clone ssh://user@hg.server/HgPath/$REPO $REPO
  cd $REPO
  jekyll build

  ## Copy it to the proper directory
  cd _site
  rm -r $DEST/*
  cp -r * $DEST

  ## Clean up
  cd ../..
  rm -r $REPO
fi

This script isn't perfect; it needs to check the exit code from the Jekyll build process before whacking the current site (and notifying for a failed build would be a nice addition). However, with Jekyll being the same on both development and production, and a single committer, this is fine for our purposes.

Finally, each script needs to be run to check for the presence of the semaphore (or TRIGGER, as the script calls it). The following cron definition will check every 4 minutes for a change.

*/4 *   *   *   *    /opt/jobs/jekyll/tech-blog.sh > /dev/null

Conclusion

Overall, we're pleased with the results. The inter-server communication is light, only requiring one initiated ssh connection from each server, so we won't run afoul of rate limits. With the work being done on the destination server, the amount of time where there are no files in the directory (between the rm -r $DEST/* and the time the cp -r * $DEST finishes) is very short; it would have been much longer if the directory were being repopulated across the network, or more complex if we added a staging area on the web server. Each piece can be run separately, and if we've committed a post with a future date, we can run the same touch command to make that post appear.

Next time, we'll discuss our experiences converting a non-WordPress site.

We've begun running Mono on some Bit Badger Solutions servers to enable us to support the .NET environment, in addition to the PHP environment most of our other applications use. While Ubuntu has nice packages (and Badgerports even brings brought them up to the latest release), one thing that we were missing was a “conf.d”-type of configuration; my “/applications=” clause of the command was getting really, really long. We decided to see if we could create something similar to Apache / Nginx's sites-available/sites-enabled paradigm, and we have succeeded!

To begin, you'll need to create the directories /etc/mono/fcgi/apps-available and /etc/mono/fcgi/apps-enabled. These directories will hold files that will be used define applications. The intent of these directories is to put the actual files in apps-available, then symlink the ones that are enabled from apps-enabled. These files have no name restrictions, but do not put an extra newline character in them. The script will concatenate the contents of that file to create the MONO_FCGI_APPLICATIONS environment variable, which tells the server what applications exist. (The syntax is the same as that for the “/applications=” clause - [domain]:[URL path]:[filesystem path].) Here's how the site you're reading now is configured (from the file djs-consulting.com.techblog.conf)…

techblog.djs-consulting.com:/:/path/to/install/base/for/this/site

Finally, what brings it all together is a shell script. This should be named “monoserve” and placed in /etc/init.d. (This borrows heavily from this script a script we found online, which we used until we wrote this one.) Note the group of variables surrounded by the “make changes here” notes - these are the values that are used in starting the server. They are at the top so that you can easily modify this for your own needs.

#/bin/bash

### BEGIN INIT INFO
# Provides:          monoserve.sh
# Required-Start:    $local_fs $syslog $remote_fs
# Required-Stop:     $local_fs $syslog $remote_fs
# Default-Start:     2 3 4 5
# Default-Stop:      0 1 6
# Short-Description: Start FastCGI Mono server with hosts
### END INIT INFO

PATH=/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin
DAEMON=/usr/bin/mono
NAME=monoserver
DESC=monoserver

## Begin -- MAKE CHANGES HERE --
PROGRAM=fastcgi-mono-server2 # The program which will be started
ADDRESS=127.0.0.1            # The address on which the server will listen
PORT=9001                    # The port on which the server will listen
USER=www-data                # The user under which the process will run
GROUP=$USER                  # The group under which the process will run
## End   -- MAKE CHANGES HERE --

# Determine the environment
MONOSERVER=$(which $PROGRAM)
MONOSERVER_PID=""
FCGI_CONFIG_DIR=/etc/mono/fcgi/apps-enabled

# Start up the Mono server
start_up() {
    get_pid
    if [ -z "$MONOSERVER_PID" ]; then
        echo "Configured Applications"
        echo "-----------------------"
        # Construct the application list if the configuration directory exists
        if [ -d $FCGI_CONFIG_DIR ]; then
            MONO_FCGI_APPLICATIONS=""
            for file in $( ls $FCGI_CONFIG_DIR ); do
                if [ "$MONO_FCGI_APPLICATIONS" != "" ]; then
                    MONO_FCGI_APPLICATIONS=$MONO_FCGI_APPLICATIONS,
                fi
                MONO_FCGI_APPLICATIONS=$MONO_FCGI_APPLICATIONS`cat $FCGI_CONFIG_DIR/$file`
            done
            export MONO_FCGI_APPLICATIONS
            echo -e ${MONO_FCGI_APPLICATIONS//,/"\n"}
        else
            echo "None (config directory $FCGI_CONFIG_DIR not found)"
        fi
        echo

        # Start the server
        start-stop-daemon -S -c $USER:$GROUP -x $MONOSERVER -- /socket=tcp:$ADDRESS:$PORT &
        echo "Mono FastCGI Server $PROGRAM started as $USER on $ADDRESS:$PORT"
    else
        echo "Mono FastCGI Server is already running - PID $MONOSERVER_PID"
    fi
}

# Shut down the Mono server
shut_down() {
    get_pid
    if [ -n "$MONOSERVER_PID" ]; then
        kill $MONOSERVER_PID
        echo "Mono FastCGI Server stopped"
    else
        echo "Mono FastCGI Server is not running"
    fi
}

# Refresh the PID
get_pid() {
    MONOSERVER_PID=$(ps auxf | grep $PROGRAM.exe | grep -v grep | awk '{print $2}')
}

case "$1" in
    start)
        start_up
    ;;
    stop)
        shut_down
    ;;
    restart|force-reload)
        shut_down
        start_up
    ;;
    status)
        get_pid
        if [ -z "$MONOSERVER_PID" ]; then
            echo "Mono FastCGI Server is not running"
        else
            echo "Mono FastCGI Server is running - PID $MONOSERVER_PID"
        fi
    ;;
    *)
        echo "Usage: monoserve (start|stop|restart|force-reload|status)"
    ;;
esac

exit 0

This needs to be owned by root and be executable (chmod +x monoserve). You can use update-rc.d monoserve defaults to set this to start at boot.