Ever since I switched this blog over to a Gulp-based toolchain - holy crap, 2 years ago - I had a TODO to wire this thing up for continual deployment. Well, today I finally did it.
Just to test the cloud machinery I'm (ab)using here, I'm writing this post as a new commit on GitHub in a browser. When I get done and commit this, Travis CI will fire up, install my node-based blog code and build all the content. Assuming that goes well, my code on Travis will then publish any changes in the content to Amazon S3. And, voila, I will have blogged via the magic of cheap cloud infrastructure.
Up until now, I've been doing this all from my laptop: Write a post in Vim, commit to git, build & deploy from my local machine. I'd push to GitHub to work in the open and have a handy backup. But from here on, the push to GitHub will actually make the magic happen!
If you're curious about the plumbing, the changes in my recent commits can tell the exact story. But, what I did in a nutshell is this:
- Switched to using environment vars to configure AWS credentials for S3 publishing.
- Used
travis secureto supply credentials in encrypted environment vars. - Started maintaining a copy of file hashes on the site so that gulp-awspublish will only publish changes.
- Composed a .travis.yml to build & deploy everything.
And, if you're reading this post, then that means everything worked when I hit the "Commit new file" button! (And, if you're reading this sentence, then I was able to update this post, too!)