brunoguerra / masochist

Website infrastructure for over-engineers

What

This repo contains the source code and content for my website at wincent.com.

Content is authored in plain-text-friendly markup formats like Markdown and served using a dynamic stack (described below). New code can be deployed and content added or updated via git push.

Stack

• React: Declarative, component-oriented view layer.
• Relay: Declarative data-management.
• GraphQL: Hierarchical data querying language, type system and server.
• Git: Main content storage.
• Redis: Indexing and caching.
• memcached: Ephemeral caching.

Supporting tools and technologies:

• Markdown: Preferred content markup.
• Vim: Content editing.
• Marked 2: Local content previewing.

Questions

Why not use a static site generator?

A static site generator would very much be the right tool for this job, however, building the site on a custom React/Relay/GraphQL stack was much more fun, so I did that instead.

Why the name "Masochist"?

Please see the introductory blog post, "Introducing Masochist".

Development

Quickstart

Note: In the following, npm can be substituted for yarn if desired.

Webpack-based hot-loading workflow

git clone https://github.com/wincent/masochist.git
cd masochist
yarn # Or `npm install`.
yarn update-schema # Or `npm run update-schema`.
yarn update-indices # Whenever content changes.
yarn start # Or `npm run start`.

Running in production-like environment

yarn run build # Builds files under `dist/`.
yarn start-prod # Or `npm run start-prod`.

Running in production

export NODE_ENV=production
yarn # Or `npm install`.
gulp build
node dist/bin/updateIndices.js # Whenever content changes.
node dist/server/main.js

Configuration

In __DEV__, Masochist will look for content in the current repo (ie. ".").

In production, it expects to find a content repo at "/var/masochist/content".

In __DEV__, you can override this with npm config set. For example, in my local development environment, I have the Masochist Git repo checked out in one folder, and a second copy of it with the "content" branch checked out alongside it at "../masochist-pages" (see below for more details on this set-up). I can override the __DEV__ default of "." with:

# Use npm, not yarn, for this:
npm config set masochist:content-repo '../masochist-pages'

Deployment cheatsheet

You could do this in any number of ways but the way I'm doing it is using two local repositories as follows:

Local "masochist" repository

Structure

• master branch checked out.
• origin remote pointing at git.wincent.com.
• github remote pointing at GitHub.
• masochist remote set up to do Heroku-style deploy-on-push, pointing at an Amazon EC2 instance configured using Ansible.

Commands

$ git push masochist master # Deploy app (after initial provisioning).
$ git push masochist # Subsequent deployments.
$ git push origin # Propagate code, but no deploy.
$ git push # Shorthand for `git push origin`.
$ git push github # If you can't be bothered waiting for it to auto-replicate.

Local "masochist-pages" repository

Structure

• content branch checked out.
• content remote configured to do Heroku-style push-to-publish.
• origin remote pointing at git.wincent.com.
• github remote pointing at GitHub.

Commands

$ git push content content # First push after initial provisioning.
$ git push content # Subsequent pushes.
$ git config branch.content.merge refs/heads/content # For laziness.
$ git push # Simple.

Rollback to a prior rev $HASH

$ git push masochist +$HASH:master

Or just switch symlinks and sudo monit restart masochist.

Force a deploy without actual code changes

$ git commit -m Deploy --allow-empty
$ git push masochist