Gating My Content

Mark McFate — Mon, 30 Jan 2023 14:45:01 -0600

Gating Content in JAMstack Sites

This section’s title was borrowed from a Stackbit article with the same title, Gating Content in JAMstack Sites. Working through that article to password protect some of the content at https://Wieting.TamaToledo.com is my tech pursit today.

Nope, Not on Netlify

😦 Last evening I took a shot at implementing the Netlify Identity tricks from the aforementioned article, but could not easily get it to work. The problem, I think, is that the https://Wieting.TamaToledo.com on Netlify already uses Netlify Identity for authentication of my Netlify CMS forms, and adding a second, separate instance of that service isn’t trivial and perhaps isn’t even feasible. I also tried implementing some quick Staticrypt CLI protection but that also failed. Netlify does provide a really quick and painless solution, but it costs $20/month, at a minimum, to enable it.

New Staticrypt Strategy?

So, my next shot at this will involve creating a new Eleventy site just for the Wieting’s protected content. Wish me luck and follow along here if you like.

Trying Azure DevOps

I recently created a personal Azure account, registered to summitt.dweller@gmail.com, and last evening (January 31, 2023) I took a dive into Azure DevOps under that account. The “welcome” email that I received says I now have an “organization” URL at https://dev.azure.com/summittdweller.

I jumped into Azure DevOps because it looks like within that environment I can establish a Content Management System (CMS) not unlike the NetlifyCMS (or perhaps it IS NCMS) that I run for the Wieting Theatre, hosted with Netlify.com. I really like NetlifyCMS, but thus far I’ve had limited success with it, and ONLY at Netlify.com where the user authentication process is nicely streamlined. I hope that Azure DevOps has user authentication that’s just as easy to manage, and at less cost.

So, I guess the strategy now is to see what Azure DevOps has to offer, rather than venturing further with Staticrypt.

That’s a TEMPORAY wrap, this post isn’t finished just yet.

Migrating the Wieting Site in Drupal 8

Mark McFate — Fri, 28 Feb 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Migrating the Wieting Site in Drupal 8

Sorry for my extended absence here, I’ve been uber-busy with work, but have also been able to work a little (lots of long nights and weekends) on a long-overdue update of https://Wieting.TamaToledo.com in Drupal 8. It’s true, I have been thinking about moving that site to make it static, almost certainly using Hugo, but I thought before doing so I’d give Drupal 8 one more try. I’m pleased to report that it’s working nicely again. Here’s how I did it, and how I plan to keep it updated…

Saved by “docker-compose-drupal”

I actually started the process of migrating and updating the Wieting website in Docksal, but I failed… I could never figure out how to reliably and easily push my work to production from there. Docksal just seems to wrap so much of itself into the cli container that drives it, I found it difficult to de-couple from that in production.

So I went looking elsewhere and discovered Lando, and I did considerable work with it because Lando, at least in the case of Drupal, builds a 3-part development stack that looks a lot like what I wanted to deploy in production. The parts of a Lando stack, and my production stack, are the same:

An nginx web server container,
A mysql or mariadb database container, and
A php codebase container.

But once again I had trouble figuring out exactly how to push that development stack to production. So, I went looking again for an open (and by that I mean “free” and freely modifiable) production-ready stack configuration that uses the 3-parts I had in mind. I found docker-compose-drupal and almost immediately created my own fork of that project. Using my docker-compose-drupal fork I set off to build a production instance, NOT a development instance, on my summitt-dweller-DO-docker droplet at DigitalOcean. That project came to life in /opt/docker-compose-drupal there.

The evolution of summitt-dweller-DO-docker:/opt/docker-compose-drupal was quite an adventure, in large part because the Wieting’s web site had gone almost a year without any updates. That meant upgrading the Drupal core from version 8.2.? to version 8.8.2, along with countless modules that had changed rather dramatically, so there were lots of bumps along the way. I also had to move the site from a multi-site configuration, the old site lived in a container at /var/www/html/web/sites/wieting, to a default configuration that lives in the container at /var/www/localhost/web/sites/default.

Fortunately, docker-compose-drupal includes some nice scripts and features to help with things like that, and they are nicely documented in the project’s README.md file. I’ll elaborate on a few of the key features later in this post, but most of what I did during the migration and update is water-under-the-bridge, and should not need to be repeated, ever, so I won’t elaborate on all of it here. It’s worth noting here that the work I did in my fork all happened in a branch named wieting.

Moved to “wieting-D8-DO”

Once I had a new site working as I’d hoped, I wanted to begin a fresh new development and update cycle, so I used a process I’ve documented in my work blog: “How to Create a New GitHub Repo from an Existing Branch”. That work created the Wieting site’s new home, https://github.com/SummittDweller/wieting-D8-DO, based on the wieting branch of the aforementioned fork of docker-compose-drupal.

Site Update Workflow

Having built the wieting-D8-DO project I need a reliable workflow that I could use to keep it up-to-date. I created that workflow by migrating the existing production site at summitt-dweller-DO-docker:/opt/docker-compose-drupal, where it responded as https://Wieting.TamaToledo.org, to a new staging copy at summitt-dweller-DO-docker:/opt/wieting-D8-DO, where it would respond, temporarily, at my designated “staging” address, https://Wieting.SummittServices.com.

While working as administrator on summitt-dweller-DO-docker the entire command-line process looked like this:

echo $(date --iso-8601)
cd /opt/docker-compose-drupal
git ls-files --others --ignored --exclude-standard > $(date --iso-8601).ignored.list
tar czvf $(date --iso-8601).ignored.list.tar.gz --files-from $(date --iso-8601).ignored.list
gpg --encrypt --recipient summitt.dweller@gmail.com $(date --iso-8601).ignored.list.tar.gz
rm -fr $(date --iso-8601).ignored.list.tar.gz
cd /opt
git clone https://github.com/SummittDweller/wieting-D8-DO.git
cd wieting-D8-DO
cp -f ../docker-compose-drupal/2020-02-27.ignored.list.tar.gz.gpg .
gpg --decrypt 2020-02-27.ignored.list.tar.gz.gpg > ignored.tar.gz
tar xzvf ignored.tar.gz
rm -f ignored.tar.gz
cd ../docker-compose-drupal
scripts/mysql dump
mv -f database/dump/dump.sql /opt/wieting-D8-DO/database/mysql-init
cd /opt/wieting-D8-DO
nano .env
nano docker-compose.yml
docker-compose up -d

Breaking the Workflow Down

Moving the site from /opt/docker-compose-drupal and https://Wieting.TamaToledo.com, to /opt/wieting-D8-DO and https://Wieting.SummittServices.com is a command-line process like this, with comments…

Comments / Commands
# Set the working directory to the server’s project root, then `git clone` the wieting-D8-DO project. `cd /opt` `git clone https://github.com/SummittDweller/wieting-D8-DO.git`
# Save today’s date in ISO 8601 format to `${today}`; we will use it a few times later on. `today=$(date --iso-8601)`
# Set working directory to the initial project. Put the site into ‘maintenance_mode’, flush all caches, dump a copy of the project’s database, move previously dumped databases to an .inactive directory, and move the dumped database so it will initialze the new site upon startup. `cd /opt/docker-compose-drupal` `scripts/drush sset system.maintenance_mode 1 --input-format=integer` `scripts/drush cr` `scripts/mysql dump -f dump_${today}.sql` `mv -f /opt/wieting-D8-DO/database/mysql-init/*.sql /opt/wieting-D8-DO/database/mysql-init/.inactive/` `mv -f database/dump/dump_${today}.sql /opt/wieting-D8-DO/database/mysql-init/`
# Fetch a list of ignored files, then tar the ignored files to make an archive, and encrypt the tarball for security purposes, then remove the itermediate tarball. `git ls-files --others --ignored --exclude-standard > ${today}.ignored.list` `tar czvf ${today}.ignored.list.tar.gz --files-from ${today}.ignored.list` `gpg --encrypt --recipient summitt.dweller@gmail.com ${today}.ignored.list.tar.gz` `rm -fr ${today}.ignored.list.tar.gz`
# Now set the working directory to the new project, copy the tarball from the old site to the new one, decrypt and then restore/extract the tarball contents, and finally, remove the intermediate tarball. `cd /opt/wieting-D8-DO` `cp -f ../docker-compose-drupal/${today}.ignored.list.tar.gz.gpg .` `gpg --decrypt ${today}.ignored.list.tar.gz.gpg > ignored.tar.gz` `tar xzvf ignored.tar.gz` `rm -f ignored.tar.gz`
# Working in the new directory, edit the .env file to set `PROJECT_NAME`, `NGINX_HOST_HTTP_PORT` and `NGINX_HOST_HTTPS_PORT` that won’t conflict with existing names. `nano .env`
# Still in the new directory, edit the docker-compose.yml file to set the nginx service `labels:` to include `traefik.frontend.rule=Host:wieting.SummittServices.com`, to properly address the new site. `nano docker-compose.yml`
# Spin up the new site for testing. `docker-compose up -d`
# Turn off ‘maintenance_mode’ in both sites. `/opt/docker-compose-drupal/scripts/drush sset system.maintenance_mode 0 --input-format=integer` `/opt/wieting-D8-DO/scripts/drush sset system.maintenance_mode 0 --input-format=integer`

That worked nicely! Time to end this saga, but I’ll return shortly, in another post, to document my workflow for ongoing maintenance and updates. Until next time…

@Summitt Dweller’s Personal Blog - Wieting

Gating My Content

Gating Content in JAMstack Sites

Nope, Not on Netlify

New Staticrypt Strategy?

Trying Azure DevOps

Migrating the Wieting Site in Drupal 8

Migrating the Wieting Site in Drupal 8

Saved by “docker-compose-drupal”

Moved to “wieting-D8-DO”

Site Update Workflow

Breaking the Workflow Down