Blogging with Eleventy

Bill Horsman on 27 March 2023

Having posted sporadically on Medium I thought I'd finally put my thoughts into my own space. I moved the Logical Cobwebs website to Eleventy last week and while I'm on a roll…

Eleventy #

I started off with Eleventy Blog template which not only saves you time but it demonstrates a lot of techniques. There's some solid CSS included but my approach was to start from scratch and pull in bits that I wanted.

Lighthouse #

I love that, out of the box, the blog template includes the Lighthouse plugin which tests performance, accessibility, best practices and SEO. If you're not 100% on all those then the deploy fails! You can override that if you really want.

Docker #

I wanted to be able to run this website easily on my Mac so I set up Docker.

This is my Dockerfile. Not much going on here:

1. Use an image providing Node 18
2. Copy over the app
3. Install the packages
4. Tell it to run on port 8082

FROM node:18.15-bullseye

RUN mkdir -p /app
WORKDIR /app

COPY . /app/
RUN npm install

EXPOSE 8082

CMD [ "npx", "@11ty/eleventy", "--serve", "--port=8082" ]

We're using Traefik as a load balancer which makes things easy (even though we don't really need it). Here's the docker-compose.yml file:

version: "3.7"

services:

  lb:
    image: traefik:v2.9
    command:
      - --providers.docker
    ports:
      - 80:80
    volumes:
      - /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock

  web:
    build:
      context: .
      dockerfile: Dockerfile
    labels:
      - traefik.http.routers.whoami.rule=Host("dev.logicalcobwebs.com")"
    depends_on:
      - lb
    container_name: logicalcobwebs
    restart: always
    volumes:
      - ./:/app:cached
    ports:
      - 8082:8082

volumes:
  logicalcobwebs-app:

And now it's just

docker-compose up web

And with dev.logicalcobwebs.com pointing to 127.0.0.1 I'm all set to go with it running at http://dev.logicalcobwebs.com (note: that website isn't available on the Internet, it's just on my machine).

Let's Encrypt! #

But we can do more! Let's get SSL working automatically by asking Let's Encrypt to generate the SSL certificate using a DNS challenge from DNSimple.

version: "3.7"

services:

  lb:
    image: traefik:v2.9
    environment:
      - DNSIMPLE_OAUTH_TOKEN
      - DNSIMPLE_BASE_URL
    command:
      - --providers.docker
      - --entrypoints.http.address=:80
      - --entrypoints.https.address=:443
      - --api.insecure=true
      - --certificatesresolvers.letsencrypt.acme.dnsChallenge=true
      - --certificatesresolvers.letsencrypt.acme.dnsChallenge.provider=dnsimple
      - --certificatesresolvers.letsencrypt.acme.dnsChallenge.delayBeforeCheck=0
      - --certificatesresolvers.letsencrypt.acme.email=${EMAIL}
      - --certificatesresolvers.letsencrypt.acme.storage=/letsencrypt/acme.json
    labels:
      - traefik.http.routers.to-https.rule=HostRegexp(`{host:.+}`)
      - traefik.http.routers.to-https.entrypoints=http
      - traefik.http.routers.to-https.middlewares=to-https
      - traefik.http.routers.traefik.rule=Host(`traefik.${DOMAIN}`)
      - traefik.http.routers.traefik.entrypoints=https
      - traefik.http.routers.traefik.service=api@internal
      - traefik.http.routers.traefik.tls=true
      - traefik.http.routers.traefik.tls.certresolver=${CERT_RESOLVER}
      - traefik.http.middlewares.to-https.redirectscheme.scheme=https

    ports:
      - 80:80
      - 8080:8080
      - 443:443
    volumes:
      - ./data/letsencrypt:/letsencrypt
      - /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock

  web:
    build:
      context: .
      dockerfile: Dockerfile
    labels:
      - traefik.http.routers.https.rule=Host(`${DOMAIN}`)
      - traefik.http.routers.https.entrypoints=https
      - traefik.http.routers.https.tls=true
      - traefik.http.routers.https.tls.certresolver=${CERT_RESOLVER}
    depends_on:
      - lb
    container_name: logicalcobwebs
    restart: always
    volumes:
      - ./:/app:cached
    ports:
      - 8082:8082

volumes:
  logicalcobwebs-app:

Finally, a .env file like this. You need to get DNSIMPLE_OAUTH_TOKEN from your DNSimple account settings, not from your user settings.

DOMAIN=dev.logicalcobwebs.com
EMAIL=
CERT_RESOLVER=letsencrypt
DNSIMPLE_BASE_URL=https://api.dnsimple.com
DNSIMPLE_OAUTH_TOKEN=

Now we can use https://dev.logicalcobwebs.com.