Migrating my Blog to PocketBase

As the plight of every developer, we must constantly improve our personal website and blog to reflect our latest passion and exploration.

...of course not all developers need to do this but it is a fun exercise none the less.

I really enjoy being able to look at new tech stacks and find ways to simplify my setup or make it more fun to use.

Context

For those that have not been following my migrations, I have been an early adopter on various tech stacks and especially for my blog.

My very first website for rodydavis.com was made with Wix which was great to get started but it was before I became a developer.

I later migrated my blog to Github Pages with Jekyll and was very happy with it and introduced me to Frontmatter and Markdown.

This worked for awhile, but then I wanted to make it a lot more customized which is when I migrated to 11ty. This was a dead simple migration as I just needed to move my blog posts and add some config for my website metadata.

As much as I loved the customization, it became hard to make my blog depend on Node and npm but I still adopted it and setup some Github Actions to build my website when I push commits.

I then migrated my blog to a custom solution based on lit web components but did not last long as it was mostly just for exploration. In the past I even had a version of my website built with Flutter too.

The next big migration was to Obsidian which allowed me to publish my website with Obsidian Publish very easily from my phone or laptop.

This finally broke me free of needing to bundle my website and was very happy with this setup, which leads me to today...

PocketBase

For those that are not familiar, PocketBase is a Go library that compiles to a single binary, backed by SQLite as an open source CMS.

This makes it dead simple to deploy to a small VPS and and just point your custom domain to it with free SSL cert generation using Let's Encrypt.

Coolify

The other thing I am now doing is hosting my website on Coolify via a Hetzner server.

This has been a joy to use and makes it easy to deploy to VPS you own in GCP, Digitial Ocean, Hetzner or even a Rasberry PI 👀.

Conclusion

Now I can deploy my website with no build step (for the frontend) and have dynamic features like the Open Heart Protocol, live view counts, dynamic tag pages, live editor on the web and generated RSS feed.

If you want to see the source code you can find it here.