How I published my site on compost.party

These are the steps I took to publish my site on compost.party.

I wrote this page off of the top my head (and copied/pasted the content of files); feedback and corrections welcome.

–

Create a directory:

$ mkdir compost

Then change directory:

$ cd compost

Create a file for your homepage:

$ touch index.md

then edit that file using the text editor nano, for example:

$ nano index.md

Type some text, for example:

---
lang: en
title: This is the title of my page.
...

some text.

[a link](https://compost.party).

Save.

Now add a CSS file called style.css:

$ touch style.css

You can copy mine if you want:

html, body{
font-family:monospace; 
font-size: 1em; 
color: black;
background: white;
max-width: 600px;
margin-left: auto;
margin-right: auto;
padding: 5px;
}
/* unvisited link */
a:link {
color: lightseagreen;
}
/* visited link */
a:visited {
color: hotpink;
}
/* mouse over link */
a:hover {
color: magenta;
}
/* selected link */
a:active {
color: pink;
}

You can also add a favicon. This, you can find online; there are websites that help you generate a favicon.

Add a header; create a file header.html, and populate the file with:

<title> whatever title you want </title>
<meta charset="utf-8">
<html lang="en">
<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1" />
<link href="style.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" />

Now we add a script to convert the markdown file index.md into an HTML file
index.html.

To do so, create a file called build.sh containing the following script:

# (c) 2024 w. kennedy
#!/bin/bash
echo Welcome to the markdown to html converter.
markdown_file="$1"
echo file is "$markdown_file"

if [[ -z "$markdown_file" ]]; then
  printf "Usage: %s <markdown_file>\n" "$0"
    exit 1
    fi

    output_file="${markdown_file%%.*}.html"

    pandoc "$markdown_file" -f markdown+hard_line_breaks \
     -t html5 -H "header.html" \
        --template="default.html5" \
         -o "$output_file" --verbose --highlight-style=breezedark


         printf "markdown_file: %s\n" "$markdown_file"
         printf "output_file: %s\n" "$output_file"

         echo We did it capitan, we converted to html.

Make this script executable:

$ chmod +x build.sh

Download Pandoc:

$ sudo apt install pandoc

Run the script:

$ ./build.sh index.md

You should have a file called index.html, check:

$ ls

Now that you have index.html, you want to upload it onto the server.

To do so, I use the programme rsync.

We will create a short script to upload your files to the server, and then you’ll use that script to update your website.

$ touch deploy.sh

In this file add the following command:

$ rsync -vz index.html style.css "$@" -e 'ssh -p23' --progress username@compost.party:/var/www/username.compost.party/html

Substitute username for your actual username.

Make the script executable:

$ chmod +x deploy.sh

To publish your site to the server, run:

$ ./deploy

If you want to add pages or other files, e.g. pdf or images, to your site, run:

$ ./deploy page.html file.pdf image.png

PS: you might need to edit the template Pandoc uses; I don’t remember if I did so. If you need to do so, you can find the file default.html5 on the repository of Pandoc, and then customise it. Feel free to email me if you have questions. You can find my email address on the flyers published on https://yctct.compost.party.

Shortcomings of this setup

When you delete files locally, on your machine, you need to log in the server to remove them.