deletethis.net

Eleventy on GitHub Pages (Part 2)

Previously, I made an Eleventy based GitHub project with GitHub automation to run Eleventy when checking in changes. I stopped at that point because hooking in all my old blog's posts without changing their URIs sounded like a big pain, but now I've decided to go ahead and just link from old blog to new blog and not try to move them.

This time, I've hooked up a custom subdomain (dave.deletethis.net) to the GitHub output which was surprisingly easy:

  1. GitHub has docs on using a custom subdomain which I followed mostly trouble free. The first step is in the GitHub project's Settings, Pages, Custom domain section to set your subdomain. However, this starts a domain check which fails because I haven't done the next step yet.
  2. I had to edit my DNS records. Previously I had some A records for '*' subdomains which I removed because I realized they weren't in use and added a CNAME record for subdomain dave to david-risney.github.io.
  3. After waiting a while (for the A record entries to expire) GitHub's domain check succeeded.
  4. In step 3 GitHub will check in a file named CNAME to your gh-pages branch for you. However, I'm auto generating the contents of the gh-pages branch from my main branch. So I copy the CNAME file to the public folder. Eleventy will copy the contents of the public folder over directly.
  5. Now that I'm using a custom domain I updated my /eleventy.config.js file's pathPrefix property to / since now the content is rooted at the root path of the domain rather than in a subfolder.
  6. I also updated /_data/metadata.js to update the name of the blog and the URI of the blog.

After pushing all these changes I have my Eleventy GitHub blog running on a custom domain. In the future I need to update the template and see if I can start importing content from the old blog.