How to self-host a blog

One of the purposes of this blog is to experiment with simple ways put up a blog on the web without depending on any blogging platform. For this I wanted a free way to deploy static web pages on my own domain name. For this I chose Firebase Hosting, partly because I am very familiar with it, having worked on the Firebase team and personally knowing many of the Hosting development team, but also because it is actually the best solution I know of for what I want, and it is free for sites that have the traffic of typical personal sites.

People who are comfortable using the command line might be interested in following along the steps I took.

1. Go to http://firebase.com, login, and create a project.

2. Install Node. If you don’t already have it installed already, I suggest first installing nvm then doing:

   nvm install stable
   nvm use stable</pre>
   

3. Follow the instructions in the Hosting quickstart.

4. Replace index.html with the HTML you want as your home page.

5. Do firebase deploy

6. I’d recommend storing everything in Git, and you might as well make it a public repo, as the web site is public anyway. (Mine is on GitHub)

7. You also might want to register a domain name, and use Firebase Hosting to use that domain name (complete with a free SSL certificate so you the https: security for free.). I did this for eamonn.org