Moving to GitLab

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As is typical, I sat down to write a new blog post and decided instead to engage in some healthy yak shaving first and move the blog to GitLab.

Previously, the source code for the blog was hosted on GitHub, and the generated blog was hosted on Azure. The process of deploying to Azure was kind of a pain, and the SSL configuration for a bucket in Azure was needlessly difficult.

Last week at SpecTrust, we had an innovation week, during which I set up the SpecTrust engineering blog, which you can read more about here. We are in the process of moving our CI to GitLab at SpecTrust, and are considering moving our code there too, so it seemed like a good idea to put the blog project there, giving our engineers a chance to get the feel of using GitLab for a small project to help inform our broader decision.

For our engineering blog, we used a pre-made static site generator called hugo, which worked out nicely, but what really impressed me was how easy it was to get a GitLab Pages build up and running and behind our own custom domain. The CI pipeline is dead simple. Look at the new pipeline for this site, for example. They handle getting a LetsEncrypt certificate for you, so all you've got to do is point your DNS provider to your GitLab pages URL and you're done.

While I love the bespoke Rust static site generate I use for this site, the process of manually deploying to Azure has always been a bit of a hassle, and I never bothered to set up the secrets necessary to get deployment into my CI pipeline. When I sat down today to write a new post, I couldn't help but be a little envious of the situation with our blog at SpecTrust, so I decided to spend some time porting to GitLab.

The process was straightforward. I created a new project in GitLab with the appropriate name so that it would be served from mplanchard.gitlab.io rather than gitlab.io/mplanchard/project, added it as the new default remote, and pushed up my existing code. From there, I had been checking in the generated content, so I removed that, updated the generator to go to a public/ directory, added the .gitlab-ci.yml file, and voila. I set up custom domains for all the top-level domains that redirect to my blog: www.mplanchard.com, blog.mplanchard.com, and mplanchard.com. I already had Cloudflare set up so that www and bare mplanchard.com redirected to blog.mplanchard.com, so I just had to update the latter to point to mplanchard.gitlab.io, and I was done.

Now, whenever I'd like to post, all I have to do is push to the repo.

I also took the opportunity to add development environment management via nix, which I'll talk about in more detail in another post.