Configuration

Open the file nefelibata.yaml. The first part is self-explanatory, and you should populate with your information:

title: Example.com
subtitle: A blog about examples
author:
  name: John Doe
  email: john.doe@example.com
  note: This is me
url: https://blog.example.com/  # trailing slash is important
posts-to-show: 5
theme: pure-blog
language: en

# These are social links displayed on the footer
social:
  - title: Code
    url: "https://github.com/example"
    icon: icon-github
  - title: Facebook
    url: "https://www.facebook.com/example"
    icon: icon-facebook
  - title: Twitter
    url: "https://twitter.com/example"
    icon: icon-twitter

Builders

The second part defines which parts of your weblog will be built. Unless you know what you’re doing you shouldn’t change anything here:

builders:
  - post
  - index
  - tags
  - atom
  - playlist

Assistants

The next part defines “assistants”, which are HTML post-processor that run after the builders. Assistants can mirror images locally, save external links in the Wayback Machine, and more:

assistants:
  - mirror_images
  - warn_external_resources
  - archive_links
  - relativize_links
  - twitter_card
  - reading_time
  - current_weather

Publishers

The fourth part defines where your weblog will be published to once it’s been built. Neocities is easy to setup and recommended for beginners, but you can also publish to S3, FTP, and IPFS:

publish-to:
  - neocities
  - S3
  - ipfs
  - ftp

Each one of the publishers has its own configuration section in the nefelibata.yaml file. For Neocities you only need your username and password:

neocities:
  username: username
  password: password
  # api_key:

After publishing for the first time, nefelibata will print out an API key that you can use instead of your username/password. Simply add it to the configuration file, and comment out the username and password fields.

The S3 section looks like this:

S3:
    AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID:
    AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY:
    bucket: blog.example.com

    # Nefelibata will configure the bucket as website and also set your DNS
    # if you're using Route 53
    configure_website: true
    configure_route53: blog.example.com.

You need to create an S3 account in order to get the AWS credentials. If you want the S3 publisher to create the bucket, configure it as a website, upload the website and configure Route 53 to point the domain name to it you need the following policy in your IAM account (replace blog.example.com with your domain):

{
    "Version": "2012-10-17",
    "Statement": [
        {
            "Sid": "VisualEditor0",
            "Effect": "Allow",
            "Action": [
                "s3:GetBucketWebsite",
                "s3:PutBucketWebsite",
                "route53:ChangeResourceRecordSets",
                "s3:PutBucketAcl",
                "s3:CreateBucket"
            ],
            "Resource": [
                "arn:aws:route53:::hostedzone/example.com",
                "arn:aws:s3:::blog.example.com"
            ]
        },
        {
            "Sid": "VisualEditor1",
            "Effect": "Allow",
            "Action": [
                "s3:PutObject",
                "s3:GetObject",
                "s3:PutObjectAcl"
            ],
            "Resource": "arn:aws:s3:::blog.example.com/*"
        },
        {
            "Sid": "VisualEditor2",
            "Effect": "Allow",
            "Action": "route53:ListHostedZones",
            "Resource": "*"
        }
    ]
}

This will upload your weblog to an S3 bucket and run the website from it over HTTP. If you want to serve the website over HTTPS (as I do), you need to disable Route 53 (configure_route53 should be empty) and configure CloudFront.

The FTP publisher requires a host, and optionally a username, a password and a directory to which the content should be uploaded to:

ftp:
    host: ftp.example.com
    username: user
    password: secret
    basedir: public

In the example above, the files would be put inside the public directory. You can also specify an absolute path.

For IPFS you need a host running the IPFS daemon. The build/ directory will be sent to the remote host via rsync, added and published to the IPFS. The config itself is simple:

ipfs:
  username: ipfs
  host: ipfs.example.com

The weblog will be published to the InterPlanetary Name System. If you want to give it an accessible and easy to remember name, create a text record for the subdomain _dnslink.blog.example.com with the following content:

_dnslink.blog.example.com descriptive text "dnslink=/ipns/<CID>"

Where CID is the content identifier of your host. You can read more about DNSLink.

Announcers

Finally, the last part is used for syndicating your content. Currently nefelibata can publish to and collect replies from the following websites:

announce-on:
  - webmention
  - mastodon
  - twitter
  - wtsocial
  - medium
  - fawm

Each announcer has its own configuration section, with different requirements. The Mastodon, Twitter and WT.Social announcers will publish the summary of the post, with a link back to the post in the weblog. The Medium announcer will publish the full HTML, on the other hand.

The Webmention announcer is different in that it will check all the links referenced in a post, trying to discover webmention endpoints, and sending a notification is positive. The announcer also collects mentions made to the weblog, by reading them from Webmention.io.

Finally, FAWM is a website where people try to write 14 songs during the month of February. You can only publish to FAWM during February for obvious reasons. If you like making music you should try participating!