This afternoon I’m adding https://digital.grinnell.edu (site ID is 17) to my own Matomo instance and I’m prompted to upgrade PHP on that Matomo droplet (DigitalOcean). I did so quite easily following Upgrade PHP from 7.2 to 7.4 on CentOS 8 and Apache. I’ve also updated my Drupal version, and some modules, in https://digital.grinnell.edu along with adding the matomo module, but that module is now reporting:
The validation of "http://analytics.summittservices.com/matomo.php" failed with error "Error opening socket ssl://analytics.summittservices.com:443" (HTTP code 0).
The validation of "https://analytics.summittservices.com/matomo.php" failed with error "Error opening socket ssl://analytics.summittservices.com:443" (HTTP code 0).
So, node and npm seem to be all the rage these days, and perhaps for good reason. I recently fell in love with Eleventy/11ty over Hugo because it’s Javascript, not Go, and it’s elegantly simple with tons of flexibility. I recently tried to add Pagefind search to a Hugo static web site (see https://static.grinnell.edu/dlad-blog/posts/143-significant-rootstalk-retooling/). If Rootstalk, an Azure Static Web App was framed in node.js, as both Eleventy and Pagefind are, there would be no problem. The Azure scripts used to deploy those frameworks are far more customizable than Hugo, and there’s documentation to prove it.
Take note of the question mark at the end of the title, otherwise it could be somewhat misleading. This is not really a problem with Hugo, but one with cloud deployment of Hugo static apps, particularly as an Azure Static Web App.
The Nutshell
As you may know from post 143, I have successfully installed and configured Pagefind in Rootstalk, but thus far it only works locally. When I try to deploy Pagefind to the cloud, specifically as an Azure Static Web App, I can’t make it work because there’s no apparent way to invoke the necessary npx pagefind... command AFTER Hugo compiles the site, but BEFORE the site gets deployed. Azure leverages GitHub Actions to build Hugo sites, but that process also involves some custom/proprietary Azure scripts. Therein lies the problem.
I ran into a big road block with implementation of Pagefind in Rootstalk today… everything works fine in development, but I can’t easily deploy to Azure because there’s no way to “inject” Pagefind into an Azure Static Web App build before the “public” content gets deployed. I can generate the Pagefind parts after deployment, but that does me no good.
Tomorrow I need to have a look at my Rootstalk DigitalOcean deployment to see if what I already have might work there (DO uses a build script that I can add an npx... command to). If that fails I need to look back at https://www.blogtrack.io/blog/powerful-blog-setup-with-hugo-and-npm/ to see if there’s a solution there for me.
A few months ago I sat in on a CFE.dev webinar and I was really impressed with what I saw. I made a note to come back and look closer at Pagefind, and my new blog – this blog that you’re presumably reading right now – really needed a search feature, so the “Search” box on this page (I hope it’s there) is the outcome.
Glad I Found Pagefind
So, I started looking closely at search options and considered things like Lunr, which I’ve used before, and Solr, which I both love and hate (because of its JAVA roots). Pagefind was, of course, also on that short list and it quickly solidified its position at the top of the list when I found Adding search to an Eleventy site by Mike.
Earlier in this blog there’s a micropost that lays out the problem at hand. In a nutshell, most of the photos I saved in DigitalOcean Spaces are too big to be effective in this blog. They suck up lots of time and bandwidth every time this blog gets rebuilt, and then they are rendered at a fraction of their original size. This is exceptionall wasteful and unnecessary.
So, my task this morning is to install, configure, and engage the s3cmd tools to help get this done. There’s DigitalOcean-specific guidance provided in Setting Up s3cmd 2.x with DigitalOcean Spaces so that’s where I will begin. Here goes…
What follows is the README.md file from my GitHub repo where https://blog.summittdweller.com is built. It outlines how to “properly” add Python to a project such that we can create an easily reproducible “virtual environment” without storing the necessary Python libraries in GitHub.
