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DigitalOcean PerlVerse

Choosing your droplet size

There will be some resource intensive Perl setup work involved out of the gate, but then after that verse + nginx will require very few resources to run.As such, to get started I recommend spinning up the smallest droplet. Currently, that's the $5/mo. tier with 512 GB RAM and 20 GB SSD. Once the droplet has started, you can go into the console, shut down the droplet, resize the CPU and Memory only, and power the droplet back on. DigitalOcean has how to do this documented here. Personally, I upped this droplet to the $40/mo. tier during setup, which lasted less than an hour. After setup was complete, I downgraded back to the $5/mo tier.

Just as a final reminder, even though DigitalOcean covers this on their instructions as well: if you change the disk capacity as well as CPU and memory, you cannot downgrade back. You can only downgrade if you've upgraded CPU and memory only.

Initial Setup

Ubuntu

  1. Spin up an Ubuntu droplet
  2. Run:
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade -y
  1. Create a user account, replacing $USER with your desired username:
sudo adduser $USER && sudo usermod -aG sudo $USER
  1. Setup the user with a password using sudo passwd $USER and/or give your user passwordless sudo.
  2. sudo su - $USER
  3. Install some useful software:
sudo apt-get install nginx git htop tmux vim tree ack-grep perl-doc build-essential -y
  1. Get the best collection of rc files this side of the Mississippi:
cd ~ && git clone https://github.com/jhunt/env && cd env && ./install && source ~/.bashrc
  1. Make sure you can ssh as your new user:
mkdir ~/.ssh && chmod 700 ~/.ssh && vim ~/.ssh/authorized_keys && chmod 600 ~/.ssh/authorized_keys
  1. Clone verse:
cd /your/desired/directroy && git clone https://github.com/jhunt/verse && cd verse

Perl Dependencies

Ubuntu does have a Perl installation by default, you just need to update it and install the packages. First thing is to update cpan. You can update cpan by simply entering that very commad at the prompt. When it starts the initial setup you will be asked if you want it to autoconfigure - select 'yes'. Once it's complete run the following in CPAN:

install Bundle::CPAN

This will take a while to complete. At some points there will be some user input for a test to pass before continuing, so maybe get a snack but stay nearby. nce complete, run:

reload cpan

Once that's complete, use exit to exit. Now we're going to install the motherload in tandem:

cpan install Module::Build && cpan install Hash::Merge && cpan install Template && cpan install Time::ParseDate && cpan install Test::Exception && cpan install Test::Output && cpan install File::Slurp && cpan install YAML:Old

Once that's all complete, from in the verse directory, run:

perl Build.PL

This makes a binary named Build. You'll see a warning about a missing manifest, so next we'll create the manifest, test, and install (if the test passes):

./Build manifest
./Build test
./Build install

I highly recommend not skipping the ./Build test step - this will let you know if anything is missing before attempting to install and there may have been changes since this post was written.

Using your Verse

You'll want to create a www diretory for your blog, something like:

sudo mkdir /var/www/myblogname

Then go into the blog directory and build your new verse blog:

cd /var/www/myblogname
verse new

Nginx

This is useful when editing posts to see how they render before rebuilding verse. To run verse long term, you'll need to set up nginx. Here's a sample nginx config to help you get started. Note the FIXME sections that you'll most likely need to adjust to your blog configuration.

events {
    worker_connections 768;
}

http {
    ##
    # Basic Settings
    ##

    sendfile on;
    tcp_nopush on;
    tcp_nodelay on;
    keepalive_timeout 65;
    types_hash_max_size 2048;

    include /etc/nginx/mime.types;
    default_type application/octet-stream;

    ##
    # Logging Settings
    ##

    log_format   main '$remote_addr - $remote_user [$time_local]  $status '
    '"$request" $body_bytes_sent "$http_referer" '
    '"$http_user_agent" "$http_x_forwarded_for"';
    access_log /var/log/nginx/access.log;
    error_log /var/log/nginx/error.log;

    server {
    listen       80;
    listen  [::]:80;
    server_name  myblogname.com;   #FIXME: your blog's address, can use IP if you haven't set up a domain name

    default_type text/html;

    location / {
        root     /var/www/myblogname/htdocs;  #FIXME: change to your blog name
        index  index.html index.htm;

        access_log  /var/log/nginx/myblogname.access.log  main; #FIXME: change to your blog name

        error_page 404 /404.html;
        location = /404.html {
            root   /usr/share/nginx/html;
        }

        error_page 500 502 503 504 /50x.html;
        location = /50x.html {
            root   /usr/share/nginx/html;
        }
    }
    }
}

DigitalOcean has an excellent write up to help you get started with nginx.

Writing posts

You create posts using YAML files in /var/www/myblogname/data/blog. A sample blog post, named first.yml, shows the structure of the YAML post file. The entry itself is after the header information and respects Markdown syntax so **bold** is bold, etc. To view you posts in dev mode prior to publishing them, run verse run. This runs an instance of verse on port 4000, e.g. if the IP of your droplet is 10.10.10.10 you can view your blog in a broswer at 10.10.10.10:4000. To publish your posts, use verse build.