Meta Mainframe – Self Hosting a Jekyll Blog
“Share your knowledge. It is a way to achieve immortality.” – Dalai Lama xıv
In this post, I continue from Meta Memoir, where we first set up the Scratchpad blog. This week, I worked to get it online so I’m not blogging into the void. To make that happen, we need something persistent to host the blog—and that means finding the world’s cheapest virtual machine. Thanks to some insider information, RackNerd has a Black Friday deal year-round, so we can grab a VM for just $18 a year.
Once purchased, I received an email with an IP address, username, root password, and SSH port. To connect, I ran:
ssh -p <ssh-port> <username>@<ip-address>
From there, I cloned the Scratchpad repo:
git clone https://github.com/MaciejKrzysiak/scratchpad.git
You can try bundle exec jekyll serve to get the site up and running, but firewall protections won’t allow outside traffic. Instead, we’ll need to use ufw, a firewall management tool, to allow access to port 4000.
Run sudo ufw allow 4000/tcp, followed by bundle exec jekyll serve --host 0.0.0.0 --port 4000, where --host 0.0.0.0 is the magic that lets us listen for traffic on the public IP.
From a different machine, visiting http://<ip-address>:4000 should now take you to the blog! Presumably, if you’re reading this, you’ve already found ScratchPad. Next week, we’ll add some security measures (ó﹏ò｡)