Prose, Github and S3

In an effort to make the static site workflow a little less manual, I’ve created a little web-service to automate things a bit. Here’s how it works:

1. Edit posts/pages/layouts etc with prose.io
2. Github web-hook hits my service, triggering a build.

The build stage looks like this:

1. git pull (or clone if need be)
2. make
3. s3cmd sync

Setting up the server was a bit difficult for a couple of reasons. My blog is pretty straightforward, but it did need a number of things installed on the server for a successful build: make, jekyll, uglifyjs, recess, pygments and s3cmd. Also, this all had to be run as the www-data user, which had a pretty minimal environment.

So far, it’s awesome. Editing and publishing my blog as a static site on S3 is now completely automated. Code coming soon on github…