Harish Narayanan’s website

This repository contains the source code, assets and setup scripts for my personal website: harishnarayanan.org. The site is generated using Hugo, and its content is mostly written in Markdown. The site is hosted using a Linux server that’s setup using Ansible.

How to use this repository

The very first thing you ought to do is to get a copy of this repository and move into it as the working directory.

git clone git@github.com:hnarayanan/harishnarayanan.org.git
cd harishnarayanan.org

This will take a while since this site contains a lot of large static assets. In order to host a copy of the site, you need to do a couple of things:

Setup a web server to host the site

1. Go to your favourite cloud provider (I use Digital Ocean) and provision a virtual machine running Ubuntu 20.04 LTS to act as your new server.

2. Make sure you can SSH to this server. Edit setup/servers/production to reflect the domain name (or IP address) of the server, as well as the SSH username you use to access it. Also update domain_name in setup/site.yml to point to your new server’s domain name.

3. Install Ansible on your local development machine.

4. Run the setup script to install and configure the web server (alongside other bits and bobs like the firewall) on the virtual machine.

   cd setup
   ansible-playbook site.yml -i servers/production
   

Build and upload the site to the web server

1. Install Hugo on your local development machine.

2. Update Makefile to reflect your local path to the hugo executable, as well as your server’s SSH username and domain name.

3. Generate the site.

   make
   

4. Copy the generated files to the web server.

   make publish
   

Everyday development

For day-to-day development and content writing, you can run hugo locally to serve drafts of the site. This is an excellent way to work, as Hugo automatically refreshes the browser when it detects changes you make to files. Just make sure hugo is in your path and run:

hugo server --watch

When you’re happy with your progress, you can build and publish the site just as before.

Checking links

This is just a command I find handy to reduce the instances of broken links. It spiders through the site and outputs the status of links to wget.log.

make checklinks

Copyright and license

Copyright (c) 2024 Harish Narayanan.

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.