Hello, Hexo

It’s time I found a long term solution to blogging, and I’ve settled on Hexo. I haven’t been a consistent blogger in the past, but hopefully Hexo’s ease of use will help encourage me to blog more.

I knew I wanted to house my blog as a section of my personal site/portfolio. Previous iterations of my site included blogging sections that consisted of static HTML files on the server, or storing blog data in a DB. I’ve contemplated using a static site generator as a blogging too, but wasn’t very enthused about the prospect of scaffolds and generators limiting how I could build my site.

My co-worker told me about Hexo a few months ago, and I finally decided to look into it. I recently switched my site from an Elastic Beanstalk deployment to run on an EC2 instance using nginx as a reverse proxy. Nginx opened up a simple way to use both my existing node site with a static site generator like Hexo.

Once I ssh into my EC2 instance and clone my Hexo repo from GitHub and ran the server using forever, all I had to do was add a rule to my nginx.conf to route traffic going to /blog/* from my existing node application to my new Hexo server.

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location / {
proxy_pass http://localhost:3000; # Node Server
}
location /blog {
proxy_pass http://localhost:4000; # Hexo Server
}

And that’s it!

Some topics I hope to cover in my posts are:

  • HTTPS support for Node apps using EC2, nginx, and Let’s Encrypt
  • A deep dive on web scraping techniques in Node
  • Horizontal scaling and deployment with Amazon Web Services (AWS)
  • Creating Access Control Lists (ACLs) for your Node API using Redis