John Flinchbaugh Blog: JBake

I’ve moved the blog to a static site generated by JBake. The source for the content lives in my techblog project in Github, so I have a full versioning of my content for the small price of a git workflow.

I installed JBake using the familiar SDKMan that I already use to manage my Grails and Groovy installations. I initialized it with the Groovy templating engine and have started customizing the templates.

To make sure this thing is easy to update, I keep a local clone of the repo, so I can update it any time and push whenever I’m ready. I have a shell script scheduled to run on the server which basically does:

cd techblog
git fetch
git merge | grep "Already" > /dev/null || jbake

That little bit of code only runs jbake if the git pull doesn’t say "Already up-to-date". That provided me a simple little "continuous integration" hook that polls git for changes to trigger the build. I’ll probably use this trick in other places.

I brought all my old content from my old database into the new platform using a quick little Groovy script to dump out an HTML file for each article including the header of metadata for JBake’s use. While most of these old articles will remain HTML, I intend to use AsciiDoctor format for all the new stuff.

I’ve been collecting a long list of (mostly technical) articles to write, but replacing the old platform kept trumping my attempts to write. Hopefully, this move can open the flood gates, and eventually, I’ll break out another instance of it for the photography blog. JBake should make it easy and interesting to continue the blogs.