Blog -> weblog, in this case, build log
I will soon add this site as an entry to my homelab projects document. My plan is to do writeups of each of those projects in some amount of detail, and though I may or may not do those in their own posts or as part of the blogging function of jekyll, since this website is an active project, it makes perfect sense to blog as I go.
So what’s the first project I want to deal with on this site?
Make it pretty? Well, eventually, yes, but first…
Problem: I want to see and verify changes before I push them to the live site, which at time of writing is hosted with github-pages, which is using the standard jekyll structure.
Solution: render and serve in jekyll locally, duh.
Complication: I want to use a development environment that’s clean and functionally identical to github-pages.
Because I see an opportunity to learn, I want to pull the classic SysEng gambit: why bother doing something in 5 minutes when I can spend 5 hours failing to automate it? Half the point of this site is as an active blog and CV for my IT career. The other half is learning. If you checkout this version repo and build it, you’ll see it as barebones. I deliberately left a bunch of stuff up to the defaults, so I could understand how jekyll works.
Enter act. act purports to be capable of running github actions locally.
act has a dependency on Docker.
While the act docs make a claim about the github actions environment being
fully virtualized, and not being able to account for all those differences,
that’s a good place to start.