Website launch

Today, I launched the initial version of my personal website (where you are most likely reading this blog post). This marks the cumulation of over a month of preparation and development, because I wanted to create the website myself, rather than using a website builder like WordPress. While I do rely on a few external libraries, the content and styles are all mine.

Codesniffer and HTML builder

I started by creating a package with configuration for the linting tool squizlabs/php_codesniffer. While this may seem like an odd place to start, I wanted my code to have consistent styles. I don't anticipate that the package with my configuration will be useful for anyone else, but in case it is, you can find the package at danielescherzer/common-phpcs on Packagist, and the source at DanielEScherzer/common-phpcs on GitHub.

Next, using that package to enforce some style rules, I then created a utility package for building up HTML output. I prefer to avoid mixing inline HTML with my PHP, and writing raw HTML, while useful and sometimes needed, results in a less powerful interface for building up the output than a PHP library would allow. The package is available as danielescherzer/html-builder, and the source is at DanielEScherzer/html-builder on GitHub.

Coding the site

Finally, I started building up the actual website itself, with the different pages and content. I am using the html-builder library that I wrote, as well as a few popular libraries from others:

• nikic/fast-route is used for routing requests to the appropriate page.
• league/commonmark is used for converting markdown content into HTML; while the different content pages are all written using the HTML builder, for the blog posts I am writing them in markdown to simplify things, since they don't need much in the way of special handling.

Prepping the site

Before I launched this site officially, I wanted to create a staging environment that wasn't just on my computer in order for testing. A while ago, I learned about 1.111b domains, which are domains under the .xyz TLD with URLs of between 6 and 9 digits. I purchased such a domain to use as my staging environment - I'm not going to disclose what the URL is, since it is meant just for staging, but if you happen to come across it, now you know why it exists. Along with the domain itself, I purchased WHOIS protection, so that my own personal details wouldn't be exposed.

So that I could verify that my setup (a single server with both staging and production running at the same time, supported with Traefik) was going to work, at the same time I also purchased the production domain scherzer.dev from GoDaddy, and a VPS from BrownRice.

Launching the site

After purchasing the VPS and the domains, I was finally ready. I published my work to GitHub, and deployed it to the VPS. My directory structure on the VPS looks as follows:

• /home/non-root/website-traefik is a clone of DanielEScherzer/website-traefik that manages the infrastructure
• /home/non-root/production.dev is a clone of DanielEScherzer/website-content with the content, with a .env file setting
  • DEPLOYMENT_HOST_NAME=scherzer.dev
  • MATOMO_DB_PASSWORD=[redacted here]
  • COMPOSE_PROFILES=matomo
• /home/non-root/staging.xyz is a clone of the same content, with a different .env file, setting
  • DEPLOYMENT_HOST_NAME=[redacted here]
  • DANIEL_WEBSITE_STAGING=1

I deployed an initial version of my content with this blog post incomplete, so as of writing both production and staging are showing the content from commit b35c425312f646550732877e956d6447fe3c0c15, but when you read this the sites will have been updated.