Hosting this site on Google Cloud Run

Since 2009, this blog, among other personal projects, was hosted on a VM on Rackspace. The $20 per month I was paying finally got to me, and I decided to migrate it to a new host. I selected Google Cloud Run. To do that, I needed to repackage the site into a Docker Container and migrate the domain.

This site is built using Jekyll, which is a static site generator. I write the posts in markdown, and Jekyll transforms them into styled HTML. The site search is run with Javascript and a generated JSON site index.

Previously, I ran the Jekyll commands to build the site and manually uploaded them to the VM with SCP. I thought, if I’m going to migrate to a cloud native, containerized platform I should also replace the old-school techniques that I was using for build/release.

All of the code for this site, including the build/deploy process, is on Github.

Step 1 - Containerize the Build

The old way:

# deploy.sh
bundle exec jekyll build
scp -r _site/* venus@konrness.com:/vweb/konrness.com/docs/

The new way:

# build.sh
export JEKYLL_VERSION=2.5.3
docker run --rm \
  --volume="$PWD:/srv/jekyll" \
  -it jekyll/jekyll:$JEKYLL_VERSION \
  jekyll build

The benefits of containerizing the build process is that I no longer need to maintain a local Ruby installation and mess around with managing dependencies. Everything is built into the jekyll/jekyll Docker image and self-contained. When I’m done building, the container dies and nothing hangs around.

The result of this build is a new _site folder which is the static contents of the generated site, including directories, static assets (JS, CSS, fonts, etc.) and HTML files.

Step 2 - Create a deployable artifact

Now that I have the site generated, the second step of the build.sh script packages the code into a Docker container.

# build.sh (continued)
docker build -t konrness/konrness.com .

Since the site is entirely static, I am using the nginx:alpine Docker image to deliver the site.

The Dockerfile is as simple as:

# Dockerfile
FROM nginx:alpine
COPY _site /usr/share/nginx/html

This copies the static site from _site into the default web directory for the nginx container.

I can then run this Docker container locally to preview and test the site.

# run.sh
docker run -p 8080:80 -it konrness/konrness.com

Step 3 - Publish to Docker Hub

Once I have validated locally that the Docker image I have created is ready for release, I tag and push to Docker Hub and GCP Container Registry.

# release.sh
timestamp=$(date +%y.%-m.%-d)
echo Tagging version $timestamp
docker tag konrness/konrness.com konrness/konrness.com:$timestamp
echo Pushing tag: $timestamp
docker push konrness/konrness.com:$timestamp
echo Pushing tag: latest
docker push konrness/konrness.com:latest
echo Pruning...
docker system prune -f

The tag to be deployed is versioned based on the date. For instance, the tag I push on April 16th, 2021 would be named konrness/konrness.com:21.4.16. I push the tag to both Docker Hub as well as my personal Google Cloud Platform Container Registry because I am hosting the site on GCP Cloud Run, and Cloud Run does not support pulling Docker images from Docker Hub.

Step 4 - Deploy to Cloud Run

The last step of the release.sh script is to deploy to Cloud Run.

# release.sh (continued)
echo Deploying to Cloud Run
gcloud run deploy konrness-com --image gcr.io/personal-sites-310123/konrness.com:$timestamp --region us-central1 --platform managed

Easy as that.

What’s Next

This build and release process is currently entirely scripted, and only run on my local workstation. In a future iteration of this, I plan to implement a CI/CD solution that will automate the process for me. I’ll link to that here, when I get to it.