abustany / moblog-cloud

A simple blogging platform for travel blogs

Moblog cloud

This is the "platformization" of a homebrewd blogging system I've been using while traveling over the past few years [1], to take it from a couple of hand-crafted bash scripts to something more robust.

This project is a work in progress, and is still in a very early stage.

System overview

The aim is to allow users to write their blog while traveling (offline), and to push the new content when they have an internet connection. The blog posts are stored as markdown files that are then rendered by Hugo using a specific theme. Git is used for versioning and synchronizing the posts.

On the server side, we have three components:

• The adminserver exposes a JSON-RPC API allowing to create/edit/delete users and blogs. It stores its data in a SQL database. An HTML UI will be developed to allow normal humans to interact with the API.
• The gitserver speaks the Git HTTP smart protocol and receives the clones/pulls/pushes of the users. It talks to the adminserver for authenticating users, and pushes a "render" job to the work queue when a push happens.
• The worker watches the work queue and renders the blogs into HTML files. Those files can then be stored in a traditional filesystem or in a cloud storage system like Amazon S3.
• Repository data is stored on a traditional filesystem, NFS can be used to share the repositories among many servers.

[1] For some examples, see Chopsticks, Caramba, Salam or Ni Hao.

Deployment

There are two main options to deploy moblog-cloud. Both require at least a Redis server for storing sessions, and a PostgreSQL database for storing user/blog information.

Small scale: Omnibus deployment 🚌

moblog-cloud builds an omnibus binary that groups all the server-side components as well as the admin UI into a single static binary. The generated blogs can be stored in either Amazon S3 or on the local filesystem. In the latter case omnibus will also serve the generated blogs.

The following URLs are exposed when running the omnibus binary:

• /api: JSON-RPC API, accessed by the admin UI as well as other clients like the mobile application
• /git: Git HTTP smart protocol, used for cloning/updating the blogs by Git clients like the mobile application, or the scripts/mgit Git wrapper
• /admin: Admin web application, that allows users to register and create new blogs. Publishing content to a blog via the admin UI is at the moment not supported and must be done using the mobile application, or manually by pushing Hugo-formatted markdown files in the repository's content/post directory.
• /: Serves the blogs, if the blog output directory is set to a local folder

Large scale: Kubernetes 🌐

For a more resilient/scalable deployment, moblog-cloud can be deployed on Kubernetes. See the deployment README for more information.