It’s this time of the year again. I’ve recently set up this little page, and I really didn’t want it to be on Github or hosted by Github Pages.

It’s a fine service, but Github the company is increasingly moving into a direction that I don’t like. Reliability has been dropping, copilot seems to creep into more and more things, and overall it less and less like a place for tinkerer. And tinkering I like, so much that I sat down and wanted to figure out how I could self host a static website from my basement. What you see in front of you is the result of a surprising amount of technology that I’ve set up for no other reason than because I can:

• After the firewall, haproxy takes over and determines where requests go. First time using haproxy and I’m impressed what it can do and the breadth of features! Took a little while to get it all sorted out, but here we are serving requests. Requests for static websites get redirected to…
• Caddy, which will perform TLS termination and automated certificate management. I was pleasantly surprised how far Caddy has come! After caddy has determined what website the request is for, it sends them off to…
• Garage, a S3 compatible object store. Garage, just like S3, has buckets and it can expose buckets as websites. Having the data in buckets is technically not necessary, but S3 seems to be the de-facto standard for managing data, and hey, why not, this is my homelab and I do what I want.

Now, if this seems like a complicated setup it’s because it is. But it’s a nice exercise to set up a stack with new technologies and learn something new.

I’m still fiddling with the theme and the site generator, but it’s going in the direction I want. Next I’ll have to figure out how to migrate my old blog over.