Migrating website build infra

Welp, after an update to the device Jenkins runs on, this website build process finally broke. Time to duct tape it back together on the new infra. I am interested in experimenting with some other tech and possibly better segmenting the site in the future. For today I want to get this back online since it broke in September.

This website has its origins back in the late 90s. It has seen a lot of technology, including being subject to some not so great experiments of mine over the years (XSLT!). As of right now I know I am using the following tech to generate the sites static content:

PHP is a long time hold over from my third iteration mainly used for templating
Jekyll since it really made life easier to keep a blog in a reasonable format.
Node for generating things like the most recent entries on the right.

Tekton runs things in containers, so I will need to role my own since I doubt I will find one with all of these on the correct version. Would be scared if I did! Let us see what a basic Dockerfile sketch will do for us.

FROM ubuntu:23.04

RUN apt-get update && apt-get -y install php nodejs ruby
RUN php --version
RUN node --version
RUN ruby --version

Ran into a problem with interactive prompts being waited upon for configuring timezones. To resolve that issue add the following two lines. TZ sets the preferred timezone for the applications. DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive tells apt do not prompt for user input.

ENV TZ="UTC"
ENV DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive

Alright, this gives us a container with reasonable versioning info. Next up what does a build look like when scripted for development?

#!/bin/bash
(cd .cd/builder && docker build --tag website-meschbach-builder:dev .cd/builder)
docker build --tag website-meschbach:dev .

With a docker file like so:

FROM website-meschbach-builder:dev as builder
COPY . /source
WORKDIR /source
RUN ./generate.sh

FROM nginx:latest as final
COPY --from=builder target /usr/share/nginx/html

Turns out I needed the following software installed too:

make – Allowed for rapid development since a single command would only build new things.
npm – Not installed with nodejs through apt I guess.
bundle – Not installed with ruby :-/. Fixed by install ruby-full

I guess I use bower somewhere in there. I should really review that at some point :-D Ah, it’s used with revealjs. At least it has the decency to tell me to not run it as root >.< . To work around this issue I changed the builder image to add the following:

RUN mkdir -p /nobody-home && chown -R nobody /nobody-home
ENV HOME /nobody-home
ENV GEM_HOME /nobody-home/.gem
USER nobody

Then in the actual build:

COPY --chown=nobody:nobody . /source

Gems were out of date. So I spun up a container like docker run -v $PWD:/source -it website-meschbach-builder:dev /bin/bash and ran the following:

bundle update
bundle install

This needed to happen in both my tools directory which installs jekyll and within the jekyll directory itself.