# self-hosted: A tale of migrating to my own server

_Published: July 19, 2020_

If you look at [the first post](/blog/a-new-hope.html) on this site, you'll
see that this site started as a series of static HTML files that I
was, by hand, uploading to Fastmail via their "files" GUI.

Being a total nerd for automation, I was always on the lookout for
an excuse to migrate to my own server, where I could (over)engineer
a pipeline to build my static content and deploy it without ever
leaving the terminal.

That excuse presented itself in the form of needing to get a VPS to
stand up my hobby-project, [`euchre.live`](https://sr.ht/~akarle/euchre-live).
If I was going to pay for a tiny VM, it was a no-brainer to move
my personal site to it too.

This turned out to be a great learning experience -- getting hands
on experience with reverse proxies, DNS, and a variety of operating
systems and webservers (first hosted on Alpine Linux and migrated
to OpenBSD).  Additionally, I could self-host git repos, which has
long been a nerd-goal of mine :)

I plan to write a lengthier post about the joys of self-hosting in
the future, but for now, I really just wanted to give a brief
update on where I landed and what the current stack is.

I'm currently running (in no particular order):

- *OS:* OpenBSD
- *Web server:* OpenBSD's `httpd(8)`
  - Serves the `www.` static content
  - Also serves [https://git.alexkarle.com]
- *Reverse proxy:* OpenBSD's `relayd(8)`
  - Used to send traffic between https://euchre.live (which uses
    a Mojolicious web server as the backend) and
    [https://alexkarle.com] based on URL
- *`www` content:*
  - 100% static content
  - No metrics, ads, or tracking
  - Posts and pages written in markdown
  - HTML generated with a pipeline of the original `Markdown.pl`
    into a small templating Perl script that I home-rolled
- *Git:*
  - Public repos served with `git-daemon(1)` over the `git://`
    protocol
  - Push access via the `ssh://` protocol
  - static HTML of content generated via post-receive hook with
    [`stagit(1)`](https://git.codemadness.org/stagit/)

That's all for now!

[Back to blog](/blog)