I don’t know if this is the “right” way to do this, but it’s working for me at the moment, and since it took a bit to figure out, I figured I’d write up my notes.

My needs are simple: when I’m happy with an update to my blog, or another elixir phoenix app I run, Shift73k (or more in the future), I’d like to be able to just commit to my repository, and then have those changes go live. At the moment I run both gitea and my other little apps on the same Linode, so I was able to set it up like this:

While re-implementing my website in elixir/phoenix, I wanted to include an RSS feed for the blog posts. Luckily I found pretty much everything I needed in Daniel Wachtel’s Building an RSS Feed with Phoenix post, but since I’m making use of LiveView, I ran into one hiccup—errors about a missing root.xml layout!

After a few months working with Writefreely, (kept separate from a static webpack-generated front page), I just really didn’t like the feel of keeping a blog in separate software with a database, when the content itself was just markdown. Probably the thing to do would be to hop on the static site bandwagon, but I’ve been spending so much time learning elixir & phoenix for other projects, I didn’t relish spending time learning a whole new toolchain.

Luckily, there are good resources on basing a blog off markdown files in Elixir Phoenix, in a manner basically as speedy as a static site. So…

My initial problem: I have an elixir project I’m building primarily on linux, but I want it to work on Windows, too, and I’m using bcrypt, which needs nmake to compile on Windows.

One must install Visual Studio (VS), but that’s not enough.