How this website runs

Just to keep the daily streak of content going (the about section was written yesterday), this post verses about the nitty gritty aspects of how this site come to be, one request at a time.

First of all, as of now, this is a fully static website, meaning that it is just html, css and javascript that goes from server to the client (your browser) and stays there. There is no back and forth between the site (a front-end, if I may) and a backend of any kind. In the future, however, I would like this to be a web application (for my own pedagogical reasons).

I use Hugo to create the files that are served by the webserver. Hugo is the tool responsible for taking the markdown files where I write these posts and, taking into account templates, themes e some configuration, turn them into these html, css e javascript files that are served. Oh, by the way, these finished files are served by an nginx webserver that runs on a t3a.micro EC2 instance paid by the credits I received by creating an account on Amazon Web Services. The EC2 instance runs Debian (I may change this later on).

Generally I create the posts and render the full website in my local machine, inspect the content to see if everything is allright and then proceed to send the files to the EC2 instance using rsync. It is a very simple setup and I like it the way it goes. I still need to fully understand how rsync really works. So far, I (think I) know that it uses ssh to send the files.

The domain balealabs.com was acquired via the Cloudflare registrar and that implies some more steps a request goes through between your machine and my webserver. But that is content for another post. Until then, take care of yourself.