Raspberry pi
In the past I wrote a blog about generating this blog with Jekyll but I don’t think I mentioned the hardware in it. Originally this blog was hosted on a Raspberry pi 3B, with low power and small form factor being a big reason. (Apart from it being fun to use of course). While cleaning and giving much of my unused hardware a new home with new owners the Raspberry pi zero w also passed through my hands. I had originally bought it to do a tiny weather forecast viewer project. It was based on a cool project on hackaday but while fun I didn’t really need it. At first I wondered who might be interested in it. But then I realised it should also probably be enough to run my blog at an even smaller footprint, so I kept it to migrate the blog to.
Prerequisites
To get things up and running I first had to fix the internet connectivity and set a static ip in my network. The raspberry pi was already running raspberry pi os lite so I decided to keep that for now. First I set the static ip via the dhcpcd.conf file located in the /etc folder. This seemed to look fine but the internet connectivity was not working yet. Below is what I had set.
interface wlan0 static_routers=router ip static domain_name_servers=dns ip static ip_address=static ip/24
Do you spot the issue? I didn’t initially unfortunately. I instead checked my default route with the “sudo route -n” command and saw that my local gateway was not set. So I used “sudo route add default gw router ip to set my default gateway route instead. This worked but unfortunately didn’t preserve the actual config later. So in my next hobby session I noticed the extra underscore in the dhcpcd.conf file with “static_routers” and rectified the issue. Now internet connectivity was setup it was time to migrate the blog.
Migration
Luckily the migration process on paper seems very simple, I just need to do the following:
- Pull my blog files off my private Github repository
- Set up the firewall
- Reassign port fowards
- Install and configure Caddy
- Start the blog!
Step 1
This was a simple case of setting a new ssh key and doing a git pull in the right location. The files I pre-generate with Jekyll, check out one of my earlier blogs on how to do that if you’re interested.
Step 2
I like to use UFW these days, not sure if it is 100% the best possible choice but I like the easy of use over firewall-cmd (Something to further research another time..). A simple enable and ufw allow 22/tcp (for ssh), ufw allow 80/tcp and ufw allow 443/tcp is enough to get things set up.
Step 3
This step differs per ISP but for mine it’s a case of logging into the modem and setting up the right port forwards towards the static IP i’ve chosen.
Step 4
Installing Caddy was a bit more tricky, I had recently written a small ansible playbook as practice to set up caddy on a remote server. I expected this to be enough but unfortunately caddy failed to start without any discernable error message. The playbook essentially just executed this small script on the server with the right credentials.
sudo apt install -y debian-keyring debian-archive-keyring apt-transport-https curl curl -1sLf ‘https://dl.cloudsmith.io/public/caddy/stable/gpg.key’ | sudo gpg –dearmor -o /usr/share/keyrings/caddy-stable-archive-keyring.gpg curl -1sLf ‘https://dl.cloudsmith.io/public/caddy/stable/debian.deb.txt’ | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/caddy-stable.list sudo apt update sudo apt install caddy sudo systemctl enable caddy
After doing some searching I realised the default download for caddy in the apt lists is for an ARM V7 architecture and the Raspberry pi zero W uses ARM V6. So after adjusting the installation with the instruction from the caddy website I was able to get it running.
The instructions were basically download the ARM v6 version from https://caddyserver.com/download and use the update-alternatives command to set the right package. The custom one being the right one this time.
sudo dpkg-divert –divert /usr/bin/caddy.default –rename /usr/bin/caddy sudo mv ./caddy /usr/bin/caddy.custom sudo update-alternatives –install /usr/bin/caddy caddy /usr/bin/caddy.default 10 sudo update-alternatives –install /usr/bin/caddy caddy /usr/bin/caddy.custom 50 sudo systemctl restart caddy
As a last step I just have to point caddy to my caddyfile so that even after a restart it automatically hosts my website instead of the default caddy page. You can do this by opening the systemd file for caddy where it specifies the startup location along with the default caddyfile. The easiest way to find the systemd file location is to just check the systemctl service status by running “systemctl status caddy”. In the resulting output I could see the systemd file was located at “/lib/systemd/system/caddy.service”.
All done!
So far the zero w hosts this plain html blog just fine, the only weird thing I’ve noticed is that I can’t reach it on the internet when I’m on my guest wifi network strangely enough. But this is not a problem since it still works from the public internet as well as my private network. Thanks for reading and wherever you are I hope you have a great day!
