Mirage

Mirage is a simple blogging system that is 'serverless', similar to Jekyll. It will take Markdown files and build them into a site for you to deploy how you choose. It also has a built in mechanism to deploy to a variety of cloud storages, like an Amazon S3 bucket.

Installation

Make sure you have Python, with pip and virtualenv installed. If you don't, you can read instructions for installing pip and virtualenv here.

With these installed, simply run ./setup.

Writing

Before you start, modify your config.yml file's blog title and subtitle. You don't need to worry about the other values unless you plan to use the deploy functionality.

To write posts, simply create Markdown files in the posts directory. To create pages (static pages like, e.g. /about), do the same in the pages directory.

If there's a post or page you want to work on but not publish, put _draft on the end of its filename, for example Draft Test_draft.md. These files will not be compiled.

Creating your site

When you're ready to publish, run ./mirage compile. This will create a site directory, the contents of which you can put wherever you like. You can check it out locally by just opening index.html.

If you want to recompile the site whenever you change a file (e.g. if you are tweaking styles or javascript), run ./mirage watch.

Deploying your site

After compiling your site, the contents of the created site directory can be hosted anywhere. You can upload them to a webserver over FTP, or however you like.

Deploying your site to the cloud

Mirage can deploy to a number of cloud providers, including Amazon S3, Azure Blobs, Google Storage, and others.

You will need to get an access-key (or username) and a secret-key (or password) for your service, and add them to config.yml. You will also need to add the provider type, which may include a region. A full list of provider types supported is available on libcloud. For some services, e.g. S3, you may need to select an appropriate provider for your region, e.g. S3_EU_WEST.

You will also need to configure the container name. Mirage will try and create a container with this name if it does not exist already.

You can then run ./mirage deploy to push the site directly to the container. Additional configuration may be required to enable your service to be accessible as a static website, but Mirage will try and do it for you if possible.