Nodejs on Jason Curtis /Dev

CI-CD Setup Complete

Sun, 13 Oct 2024 23:05:24 -0500

I haven’t worked on this site in a long time but decided to give it a refresh. In fact, I think I stopped updates mid-post last time when I was working on setting up AWS Code Build/Deploy for doing CI/CD deployments. A lot has changed since 2020 and Github Actions is amazingly powerful. That being the case I decided to retool the CI/CD on the site and immediately ran into 3+ years of technical debt. That being the NodeJS deployment of Gatsby. Gatsby was previously the tool I used to create statically generated web content. As anyone who has worked with javascript/nodejs/npm knows, you can quickly fall into a rabbit hole of resolving dependency after dependency, especially when you’re working with code no longer being maintained. This proved to be more effort than I was willing to undertake at the moment and decided to throw it all out and start over, this time without NodeJS being involved. Found several candidates for static website generatation, but one written in Go jumped out at me called Hugo. It has templating, themes, and most importantly compatible markdown formatting. Converting from Gatsby to Hugo was mostly just copying the markdown files and the general new tool learning curve. All said and down I now have Github actions doing my linting, terraform plans, and test hugo builds when pushing outside my default branch. When merging with my default branch all of the same CI kicks off, followed by terraform apply (if applicable) and hugo artifact publishing. I’m still using cloud-front as my TLS endpoint and caching service. Check out the source if you’re interested:

Terraform Deployment

Sat, 27 Jun 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Well, I decided to do some additional work on my site. Initially I was going to set the deployment up using cloudformation, but after doing some other work using terraform for another cloud provider, I just feel like terraform makes a lot more sense and decided to use that instead. For this site I’m hosting the dns zone in route53 and using cloudfront as my web frontend. Cloudfront then uses an ec2 instance as its origin server and since most of the page data is relatively static I think that should prevent the ec2 instance from taking too much traffic and falling over. I’m not likely to do any load tests though so I guess I won’t really know unless my site gets popular for some reason. I’ve also started work on the deployment pipeline. I tend to do things manually at first just to make sure I understand how I want it to be setup, then slowly replace resources with an automated deployment. So step one is to replace ec2 instance, route53 record, and cloudfront resources with versions deployed using terraform. After I’ve completed that I’ll validate my codebuild/codepipeline configuration and begin integrating these with terraform. Below is roughly what it should look like: Enduser access: route53 dns record -> cloudfront endpoint -> ec2 instance

initial commit

Sat, 13 Jun 2020 00:00:00 +0000

It’s been a long time since I hosted anything on this domain. Once I was able to acquire it again I wasn’t quite sure what to do with it. I’m not exactly one to blog but I decided it might be useful to have a space where I can document / catalog everything I’ve worked on during my career. If you’re clever and have found a previous version of this site from when I was MUCH younger, you’ll notice quite a bit has changed in the web development space in 18 years. I’ve never been a “professional” web developer but I’ve always known enough to be able to throw up some personal projects. Before the concepts of “front-end developer” and “back-end developer” were really a thing I was doing both on part-time hobby basis. While I’ve always done development of some sort, I have never taken on the challenge of doing it professionally. That’s slowly starting to change as automation is taking over the world, so having any prior experience at all (professional or otherwise) is extremely useful. Professionally I’ve always officially been on the “operations” side of things, but my passion is in building. No matter where I’ve worked I always tried to put myself at the center of finding solutions to unique and challenging problems. This often leads to quite a bit of research and development and I think that’s where I excel. Anyway, in case you’re wondering I’ve managed to put this site together using Gatsby on top of NodeJS. This is my first tiem experiementing with NodeJS and honestly only went with it because that’s what Gatsby runs on so hopefully things turn out well. After I get this site initially published I’ll start working on developing a pipeline via Github to automate publishing of new content, hopefully that will motivate me to write some more about the process. Until then thanks for reading!