My Stack

I built my site straight on top of Rack. Why? Many years ago I had gotten so used to Rails and Sinatra that I paused and wondered, "what if I just did something on top of Rack?" And here I am. It's been a fun little exercise.

If you're familiar with the Rack interface it starts with the simple config.ru file. From here I just define my routes:

run Router.new([
 {
   :name => 'posts',
   :path => %r{^/posts/},
   :method => "GET",
   :route => Endpoints.posts
 },
 {
   :name => 'root',
   :path => %r{^/},
   :method => "GET",
   :route => Endpoints.root
 }
])

My Router class then matches the request against one of these routes. For example, the root route (/) is handled by Endpoints.root and constructs the response like so:

def root
  proc do |_env, _request_path|
    file = "#{__dir__}/index.html"
    response_for(file)
  end
end

Maybe a little dense if you haven't fiddled with Rack before, but I like how dead simple it is.

My front-end is equally simple. It's simply HTML with Holiday CSS.

But my site is more than just the code. For hosting I have my site running on a DigitalOcean Droplet. And for deployment I manage that with Dokku. Dokku is particularly important as it makes deployment dead simple: git push dokku and away it goes 🚀

One last thing which helped inform my choice of using DigitalOcean. I first started using it to play around with Dokku. I could ssh in, install my favorite packages (hello neovim!), mess something up, and start all over again with a new Droplet. Once I was done playing with Dokku I realized I could go subdomain crazy with very little trouble.

So, when I have a new idea, I can get it running by: forking my Rack app repo, getting my idea into code, deploying a database on my Droplet (maybe), provisioning a subdomain and configuring Dokku, and finally deploying it. It's really a great, tiny little platform for playing around with ideas.

Michael Ovies dot Com

My Stack

August 14th, 2022