
Free static websites with SSL for hackers - rolodato
https://rolodato.com/2018/01/14/static-websites-for-hackers.html
======
fenollp
I use Netlify which has the same qualities and requires less setup/attention.
Am not affiliated with them.

~~~
18nleung
Seconded - all you have to do is specify a build command and an output
directory and Netlify will build your site on every commit to master. You can
easily add a custom domain, manage DNS, and get Let’s Encrypt SSL with the
click of a button.

Not affiliated either, but I’ve been blown away by how seamless their service
has been.

~~~
rprime
Indeed so, I had quite a bit of code written to handle deployment for 2 simple
static websites, all got replaced by netlify in under 10 minutes, mind blown.

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transmit101
As it happens, I've got a couple of merge requests open to add HTTPS-only
support to GitLab Pages.

If anybody is interested:

Rails: [https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-
ce/merge_requests/16273](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-
ce/merge_requests/16273)

Go: [https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-
pages/merge_requests/50](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-
pages/merge_requests/50)

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eugenekolo2
I've done similar setups. I highly recommend just using Cloudflare or Netlify
instead. Unless you have an actual business reason, or love owning everything
in the stack.

The headache of managing this yourself adds up, things break, things update,
etc.

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superasn
For static sites hosting on AWS S3 is super cheap, plus with Cloudfront CDN in
front you can be sure your site is being delivered to the user by a server
near him. It's not 100% free but still very cheap for static websites[1]

[1] [https://medium.com/@sbuckpesch/setup-aws-s3-static-
website-h...](https://medium.com/@sbuckpesch/setup-aws-s3-static-website-
hosting-using-ssl-acm-34d41d32e394)

~~~
jlgaddis
At some point, I'm going to convert my web site (a neglected blog) to a static
site. When I do, I'll likely go the S3 + Cloudfront route and retire the aging
physical server it's running on.

I've looked into this a couple of times in the past and that's the method I
kept coming up with. I really want to do it but I've had trouble motivating
myself to redo the hundreds of blog posts currently in WordPress.

~~~
m3adow
There are plugins for Wordpress which export sites as static sites. I
personally used SimplyStatic [1] with success for a rather simple blog, but it
seems development has ceased. While writing this comment I also found WP
Static [2], perhaps one of those two works for you.

[1]: [https://wordpress.org/plugins/simply-
static/](https://wordpress.org/plugins/simply-static/)

[2]: [https://wordpress.org/plugins/static-html-output-
plugin/](https://wordpress.org/plugins/static-html-output-plugin/)

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andrewaylett
Another option, similar to some of the top-level comments suggesting
Cloudflare with GitHub pages, is to use Cloudflare's long-lived internal
origin certificate on GitLab and Cloudflare's public externally-valid
certificate for end-users.

Although I have to admit to not actually having set that up yet: it's on my
to-do list for a personal site that's in-progress this week.

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matthberg
What I did was a more customized version of that, I made a .gitlab-ci.yml file
which easily lets you run any scripts of your own to build, with the same end
result. Using gulp I had it run in development mode by default with watchers
and verbose outputs, yet in the ci file I called a production build that
polished everything up. For the front end side, I used pug, sass and babel
with a few other js things to make a templating system, which really helped me
understand site structures.

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up-n-atom
I suppose [https://neocities.org/](https://neocities.org/) could qualify for
the author's ideal alternative.

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JustinAiken
If you do use jekyll and gitlab, I made this jekyll plugin that does it for
you (if you'd rather have something in-ecosystem than an npm package) ->
[https://github.com/JustinAiken/jekyll-gitlab-
letsencrypt](https://github.com/JustinAiken/jekyll-gitlab-letsencrypt)

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neya
As another commenter has mentioned, Netlify is fantastic. It takes care of
everything and migration is painless. And the best of all, it's free~

This year, one of my goals is to migrate all my Wordpress blogs to Jekyll and
host them on Netlify. I'm almost done with 2/3rds of them and couldn't be
happier. Highly recommended.

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7ewis
You can use Full SSL on CloudFlare with GitHub Pages, which is end to end.

[https://blog.cloudflare.com/secure-and-fast-github-pages-
wit...](https://blog.cloudflare.com/secure-and-fast-github-pages-with-
cloudflare/)

~~~
rolodato
It is end to end but CloudFlare does not verify the identity of the origin
server. The only equivalent option would be "Full SSL (Strict)", which is not
free.

~~~
tonyztan
I believe Strict SSL is free on Cloudflare's side, but GitHub Pages does not
work with it because it does not present a matching and valid certificate.

[https://support.cloudflare.com/hc/en-
us/articles/200170416-W...](https://support.cloudflare.com/hc/en-
us/articles/200170416-What-do-the-SSL-options-mean-)

~~~
rolodato
I stand corrected :)

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paule89
If i read free i mean free as in everything, but it seems you already need to
have your own custom domain name. Meaning your own domain. Or did i miss
something?

~~~
lerax
Yes, you need it. This topic is just to have SSL and free static host where
GitHub just have a painful setup for that (also if you want custom domain here
you need pay for it, obviously)
[https://github.com/isaacs/github/issues/156](https://github.com/isaacs/github/issues/156)

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q3k
Please don't teach people how to centralize the web around a service that
isn't even supposed to be used for personal web pages [1].

[1] - "We offer Pages sites primarily as a showcase for personal and
organizational projects." [https://help.github.com/articles/github-corporate-
terms-of-s...](https://help.github.com/articles/github-corporate-terms-of-
service/)

~~~
ReverseCold
He is explaining how to do this with Git _Lab_ Pages, not Git _Hub_ Pages (the
ToS you linked to).

Other than that, yes, GitLab pages exists for the same reason.

~~~
unethical_ban
Furthermore, one can host Gitlab on their own. There is nothing wrong morally
or otherwise with using a document revision service and build platform to push
static sites.

