A simple experimental blog web service that uses its own GitHub repo as its CMS system for blog posts. This assumes the page is automatically re-built after every commit by a (most likely free) build service such as Vercel. This repo also uses serverless API functions provided by Next.js to upload new posts through GitHub's octokit API into the repo. You can get all of this for free through Vercel's Hobby plan. You're basically limited by Vercel's limits on serverless function bandwidth, execution time etc. but a small blog site can be run completely free without a hosted database this way.
This is an example of a commit made from someone posting something on the website. Ideally, you'd have a second "bot" account to make these kinds of posts, I just used my own.
After cloning the repo and downloading all the packages using npm install, you need to set a few enviromental variables in your shell before starting the next dev server. If you're deploying the site to Vercel, you'll have to set the env variables in your dashboard, you can read about it here.
| Variable | What does it do? |
|---|---|
GITHUB_TOKEN |
A GitHub access token generated here for the user which should be responsible for uploading the blog posts into the project repo |
GITHUB_REPO_OWNER |
Name of the owner of the repo to which posts should be uploaded |
GITHUB_REPO_NAME |
Name of the repo to which posts should be uploaded |
DEMO_MODE |
If this is set to yes, the website won't upload things to GitHub, I have this enabled on the demo site so I don't get spammed with commits. |
After setting these variables, you can then launch the dev server by running:
npm run devDeploying this website on Vercel of course also works.
The idea behind this project came from wanting to host a simple blog without spending any money at all. It works really well given that we stay within Vercel's limits on deployments and serverless functions.
The website is deployed from a GitHub repo and all the blog posts are built statically into it:
A user writes up a new blog post and triggers a serverless function that commits it to the GitHub repo using GitHub's octo API.
This new commit triggers a re-build of the website with the new blog post in it.
Changes are now live.
No, this is not secure at all and you're probably gonna hit your Hobby tier limits pretty soon, not to mention people can spam your GitHub repo with commits. However if you know what you're doing and you have the time to implement some securiy, feel free to use this if it fits your niche needs.
Note - apostrophes in the title mess up the whole markdown file and the site won't compile.