appahappah

README

Appahappah

As a Sri Lankan Tamil, Appahappah is what I would call my paternal grandfather. On the 4th of November 2023, he passed away in hospital.

This project is dedicated to him.

Motivation

Honouring my grandfather is one aspect, but education is also another. This could have been written in simple HTML and CSS. However, I wanted to include Golang in the mix, as that is the language I want to learn after extensive experience (relative to myself) with Typescript and Python.

How it works

Put simply, this is a miniature static site generator.

It's easy to begin with the /static directory, where we have css/styles.css, which contains our CSS rules, along with an /img directory which contains our images. These files are copied by the Go code and placed in a /public directory on the build step before the site is distributed via a CDN.

Also, in the /static directory is a template HTML file, layout.html. This is used by the Go code, where in the build step, the markdown files in /content are translated into HTML and then inserted into layout.html. This creates index.html in the /public directory.

Deployment

As mentioned, Golang is used in the build step to create files in the /public directory. Notice that this directory is not committed to the source repository. Instead, GitHub Actions will initialise this build process with every commit. With a /public directory set as an artifact, this can be used by GitHub Pages for hosting. In addition to GitHub Pages acting as a CDN host, Cloudflare is also being used to - a Go worker is used to complete the build step before deploying the output onto their CDN.

Local Development

Only Go (version 1.20 or above) is required, but other tools can be useful.

These include:

• [air](https://github.com/cosmtrek/air) - This runs the Go build step command every time there is a change in the code written. This saves having to run go run main.go after every single code change. All you need to do is run air in command line as the configuration handles the rest.
• [live-server](https://github.com/tapio/live-server) - cd ./public and once in this directory run npx live-server .. This will server the index.html file via HTTP server and can be accessed usually via http://localhost:8080.

Feedback

Thanks for reading this and I hope you find it useful and feel free to get in touch if you have any feedback, questions or suggestions.