Remaking DeKrey.NET in GatsbyJS

2020-07-19 — 2 min read

I don’t like maintenance. I prefer to make things that can just continue to run on their own and don’t require constant fixing or upkeep. As a result, almost always my own website (probably where you’re reading this at DeKrey.NET) is behind the times. Occasionally, I rebuild it. When I do, as I did just recently, it needs to be simple with no APIs that can break down and leave my site dark until I take the time to resurrect it again. If you want a fast, low maintenance website, raw HTML can’t be beaten. As a result, it tends to be relatively boring, linking people off to other sites.

But… raw HTML isn’t great for maintenance. Writing a full blog in vanilla HTML would be an arduous task. Markdown is a great alternative, but I don’t really like it for a complete site. React works well for sites, but makes for a poor tool for writing a blog. For a long time, I felt stuck.

Then I found GatsbyJS. A static site renderer? Sounds relatively boring. But, a static site won’t break down. You can tell if it works before you upload it. There’s definitely something valuable here. So, I decided to try it out. (I’ve also been working on quite a few front-end things lately, so I wanted to try tailwindcss - which Justin Myers has been talking up to me for a while.) And so, I followed the GatsbyJS tutorial, tossing in my hosting preference, I designed the following architecture.

Markdown, React, and tailwindcss assembled by GatsbyJS in a Docker containerpublishing static HTML, CSS, and JS in a production Docker container, hosted on Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) and calling out to an Azure Functions application for the Contact form.

Wow, okay, so, when written out this way, it doesn’t look simpler. Then again, I added a blog (everything before was on Medium), and it’s pre-rendered.

Creating a Dockerfile for hosting GatsbyJS was quite straightforward:

FROM node:12 AS builder

WORKDIR /src
ADD package*.json ./
RUN npm ci
ADD . ./
RUN npm run build

FROM gatsbyjs/gatsby
COPY --from=builder /src/public /pub

The gatsbyjs/gatsby image is a specialized nginx image designed to handle some smart defaults for a GatsbyJS site, such as the location of the 404 page.

All-in-all, I’m happy with my new site.