The tools behind this blog were demo'd at EmberConf by Chris Manson during a 5 minute lightning talk where he went from nothing to deployed in ~5 minutes.

Since I didn't yet have a domain, I figured it would take a bit longer.

Here are the steps I took to create this blog / site:

  • buy domain at namecheap.com

  • create blog:

    • ember new website --yarn
    • cd website
    • ember install empress-blog empress-blog-casper-template
    • create repo on github
    • push code to github
      git remote add origin <url from github>
  git add .
  git commit -m "first commit"
  git push -u origin master

  • visit netlify and setup a new netlify app

    • connect netlify to the repo I created on github

    • tell netlify about the domain I bought on namecheap

    • configure namecheap to use different Nameservers so that netlify can manage DNS for my domain.

    • wait for those changes to propagate the internet (~20 minutes)

    • notice that netlify says that I need to add a redirect from the netlify default domain to my domain

      • I created this file in config/_redirects
      # Redirect default Netlify subdomain to primary domain
https://nullvoxpopuli-website.netlify.com/* https://nullvoxpopuli.com/:splat 301!
      • add a deploy script to my package.json:
      ember build -e production && cp ./config/_redirects dist/
      • update my netlify build command under the deploy settings to use yarn deploy

  • after committing and pushing the _redirects update, I got a build error about one of my dependencies not supporting node 10. I had to create an .nvmrc file that specifies node 8, as I found out during my research that netlify will read the .nvmrc file to determine which node version to use during build and deployment.

  • after waiting for the automated deploy to finish after pushing the .nvmrc file, the blog was finally up and running!

Compared to other blogs I've setup in the past, this was very easy, and most of my time was spent on DNS configuration.