simple-org-blog/ReadMe.org

* Simple Org Blog

This project is meant to be a quick-and-dirty blog based on org-mode formatted documents.

You can put your ~.org~ files in ~content/~ and it will be rendered into ~renderedContent~ within fifteen minutes, or immediately after starting the server.

** Setup
<<Setup>>

This project requires Python 3.

*** 1. Install Python dependencies
The server is powered by ~tornado~. I use ~orgparse~ to parse org document properties. ~pandoc~ is used for converting org files into html files.

#+BEGIN_SRC sh
  pip3 install tornado orgparse
#+END_SRC

*** 2. Install pandoc
[[https://pandoc.org/installing.html][How to install Pandoc]]. 

For Ubuntu:
#+BEGIN_SRC sh
  sudo apt install pandoc
#+END_SRC

This will be used to convert ~.org~ files into ~.html~.
*** 3. Generate SSL keys

#+BEGIN_SRC sh
  openssl req -x509 -nodes -days 365 -newkey rsa:1024 -keyout certificates/server_jupyter_based.crt.key -out certificates/server_jupyter_based.crt.pem
#+END_SRC

If you have a domain name, you should use [[https://certbot.eff.org/][Certbot]] to generate your certificates. These won't pop the security warning like the self-signing ones will.

*** 4. Run the server

#+BEGIN_SRC sh
python3 SimpleBlogServer.py 
#+END_SRC

If you want to redirect all HTTP visits to the blog server (which is HTTPS only), also run the redirect server:

#+BEGIN_SRC sh
python3 RedirectToHttpsServer.py 
#+END_SRC
*** 5. Trust the certificate

Open your browser and visit ~https://localhost:8888~. 

Your web browser should complain that the website's owner cannot be verified. This is a security measure for SSL related to the certificate. Because we made the certificate ourselves, the browser doesn't know whether to trust the certificate, because there is no signing authority. 

You can safely click ~Advanced~ and add the certificate as trustworthy, because you've signed the certificate and trust yourself :).

If you want to get rid of this, you'll need to get a signing authority like ~LetsEncrypt~ to generate your certificate.
** Deploying on the internet
I used [[https://lightsail.aws.amazon.com][Amazon AWS Lightsail]] to host this server for [[https://macoy.me][my personal blog]]:

1. Create an Ubuntu machine. I used the lowest spec ($3.50/month option) because I don't expect much traffic
2. Open up port ~80~ and ~443~ in the Lightsail *Network* configuration page
3. Use the Amazon SSH stuff to start setting up the machine
4. ~sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade~ is necessary to install Python and such
5. Use [[https://certbot.eff.org/][Certbot]] to generate certificates
6. Modify [[file:SimpleBlogServer.py::80][SimpleBlogServer port]] to be port 443 (HTTPS default)
7. Follow the [[Setup]] section normally
8. Use [[https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/AccessingInstancesLinux.html][SCP]] to copy content from local machine into Amazon ~content/~