website/_posts/2024-02-03-hosting-jekyll-on-nixos.md

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post	This post is hosted on NixOS	Hosting Jekyll websites on NixOS	true

Preamble

Previously this website (ivabus.dev) was hosted on Cloudflare Pages, but recently I learned about NixOS and wanted to host my site "declarative" way.

The way

Step 1: Package website

To host website correct way, we want to have its Nix derivation. Before we create one, we have to have gemset.nix. To generate one, run this in the root of your Jekyll project

nix-shell -p bundler -p bundix --run 'bundler update; bundler lock; bundler package --no-install --path vendor; bundix; rm -rf vendor'

Note: make sure to remove all the platform-specific gems from Gemfile and Gemfile.lock, like google-protobuf, so your website could be built

Then you need to create a package for your website with code like this

{ pkgs ? import <nixpkgs> { }, bundlerEnv ? pkgs.bundlerEnv, ... }:
let
  version = "commit hash";
  repo = builtins.fetchGit {
    url = "https://address/of/git/repo";
    rev = version;
  };

  gems = bundlerEnv {
    name = "your-site";
    ruby = pkgs.ruby;
    gemdir = "${repo}/.";
  };
in pkgs.stdenv.mkDerivation {
  inherit version;
  name = "your-site";
  src = repo;

  buildInputs = with pkgs; [
    gems
    # nokogiri dependencies
    zlib
    libiconv
    libxml2
    libxslt
    # jekyll wants a JS runtime
    nodejs-slim
  ];

  buildPhase = ''
    bundle exec jekyll build 
  '';

  installPhase = ''
    mkdir -p $out
    cp -r _site/* $out/
  '';
}

Step 2: Prepare nginx

services.nginx = {
  enable = true;
  virtualHosts."your.site" = {
    root = pkgs.callPackage ./path/to/pkg.nix { };
    extraConfig = ''
      error_page 404 /404.html;
    '';
  };
}

Step 3: Rebuild

Rebuild your system and try to visit your website (don't forget to open 80 (and 443, if HTTPS is enabled) ports in the firewall, if needed)