Blot

A blogging platform with no interface. Blot turns a folder into a blog. The point of all this — the reason Blot exists — is so you can use your favorite tools to create whatever you publish.

Please don’t hesitate to contact me with any questions: support@blot.im

Overview

The internet <> NGINX (reverse proxy) <> Blot (express.js node application) <> Redis

Development setup

First, clone this repository:

git clone https://github.com/davidmerfield/blot

Then install node version 16.

Blot requires a number of different hosts to work (one for the dashboard, one for the CDN and many for your sites). In order to get this working in a local development environment, I recommend using dnsmasq to resolve everthing under the non-existent .blot TLD to the local machine:

brew install dnsmasq

Create config directory for dnsmasq

mkdir -pv $(brew --prefix)/etc/

Setup *.blot in dnsmasq:

echo 'address=/.blot/127.0.0.1' >> $(brew --prefix)/etc/dnsmasq.conf

Autostart dnsmasq - now and after reboot:

sudo brew services start dnsmasq

Create resolver directory for macOS:

sudo mkdir -v /etc/resolver

Add your nameserver to resolvers:

sudo bash -c 'echo "nameserver 127.0.0.1" > /etc/resolver/blot'

Now, Blot also requires a wildcard SSL certificate so all the template preview subdomains work. First install:

brew install mkcert
brew install nss
mkcert -install

Then create the certificates:

mkdir -p ./data
mkcert -cert-file ./data/blot.pem -key-file ./data/blot-key.pem local.blot "*.local.blot"

Finally, you are ready to start the development environment which uses docker-compose. The first time you run this command it will take a while to download the images and build the containers but subsequent runs will be much faster:

npm start

The dashboard will be available at https://local.blot and the example site will be available at https://example.local.blot. You can edit the folder for the example blog inside the data directory:

./data/blogs/blog_$ID

Inside this folder

/
├── app/
│	the code for the node.js application which is Blot
├── config/
│	configation for the system utilities which keep redis, NGINX and the node.js processes up
├── scripts/
│	scripts which help the server administrator
├── tests/
│	integration tests and test configuration for blot
├── todo.txt
│	Blot's to-do list