Jekyller Services

Serverless nodesjs services setup for AWS Lambdas that aims to be an optional set of CMS type services designed to store core content within a github repo.

These CMS services are designed to work specifically with Jekyll site structures, such as creating new blog posts within Jekyll's _post directory. Currently all editing is for html markup in content and posts, but future direction includes creating Jekyll collections of any type.

Why Use Jekyller

The main issue with CMS like WordPress, Joomla, and other is that in order to use your site you have to get the full CMS up and running. Hosting those services requires databases and processing time for each call to generate the contents of a client request. Jekyll sites have the flexibility of a templating system without having the need for a server to run afterwards.

This service works well with github pages based sites, which support Jekyll directly along with continuous deployment from the sites github repository.

By using Jekyller, you can add inline editing and content creation to the power of the Jekyller source. You can still use whatever other content editors you may be using to edit and maintain your Jekyll based site, but also use these to add more interactive administrative services to the site.

Hosted sites in github pages are free, which gives you a versioned continuous deployment based website which can optionally have its own domain name you purchase. The first 1 million calls to Amazon Lambda based services are free, and after that cost very little. For most sites, that means the total cost to host your site and services is the cost of the domain name.

Anther major benefit from this type of system is that the content of the site automatically gets versioning for all the pages and posts in the site. Future work of this project could include showing the commit history of the specific page/post in order to allow the user to roll back changes or see who made the changes and when.

Installation

You will need an AWS account to deploy the node.js services, which will deploy as AWS Lambdas.

You will need a http://github.com account to host the content of the site. Registration is free for publicly hosted sites, but you can pay for private repositories. This project currently uses basic authentication with github userid/password setup in its configuration. Github offers more elaborate authentication options and this project could be setup to use those at some point.

1. If necessary, install serverless on your development environment and configure it for your AWS account. Follow the serverless quick start directions for it to have access to your AWS account in order to deploy these services. *Do not move on to the next step until you have a properly setup AWS account and a working serverless environment for it.
2. Clone or download this repository
3. Rename example.env.yml to env.yml and set [environment variables]. This is the file where you configure the site's github account access information.
4. Run npm install to ensure the nodejs library for github is properly installed
5. Run serverless deploy

Using Jekyller in a Jekyll website

A basic Jekyller starter site that uses bootstrap 4, jQuery 3, and uses Jekyller services for dynamically editing content and creating posts. The repo can be found at https://github.com/kusog/jekyller-webclient

The webclient project will need the api endpoints for each of the lambdas created in this project. Once you've completed the first serverless deploy you will see the endpoints listed in its output. Part of the deploy output is a section for Service Information that will provide an endpoint: section with the needed urls.