New Site Setup
05 May 2020
Introduction
It was time to create a new, modern and maintainable portfolio site. Since, I have been running linux as a hobby for many years I wanted to try OpenBSD. After giving it some thought, I decided to give it a go, thus the RUNBSD logo.
For this post, I will be documenting the process I went through and some of the links I used to help setup the domain and hosting.
Checklist
Before getting started, I created an outline:
- Register Domain Name
- Find Hosting
- Select Software, etc.
- Decide Future Goals
Domain Name
Acquiring a domain name is very easy these days thanks to an abundance of registrars and available domain options. In this example, I will be using namecheap. I currently use them for some other projects and feel the support and easy interface offer an overall positive experience.
Hosting
I found a hosting provider that offered BSD called Vultr. I had not heard of them before but found their interface to be very much like that of digital ocean.
Software
I selected OpenBSD for the operating system since I wanted to learn it. From my research, I knew that OpenBSD also had a builtin web server called httpd. Next, I needed to figure out how I was going to manage the design and content of the site. After further research I decided to use Jekyll. Jekyll is a static site generator written in your favorite markup language and uses layouts to create a static website.
Software list:
Guides
I used Vultr’s documentation for the main portion of the setup. I used Let’s Encrypt for https which proved to be a lot easier than I thought.
Vultr.com - Introduction to Vultr DNS
Vultr.com - How do I generate SSH keys