publish mynt blog posts via git hook

I just discovered Mynt, and so far it's a wonderful experience. But I lacked a way of easily publish my posts. It took me a week-end, but I built a very satisfying and easy to use solution to publish your posts directly from Git. I found great inspiration from this article from James Kyle.

This method involves using a git post hook from Bitbucket, but you should be able to easily adapt it for github or any other git host. You will also need Gunicorn, as well as Supervisor, and the web server I use is Nginx. Of course, you will set up a virtualenv, and install mynt, gunicorn and supervisor. A small WSGI script will listen to a chosen url, and launch Mynt serve everytime git hook calls it. Let's assume you run the script with your user account, lovely named roger.

Server script

Let's call it update_mynt.py

#!/home/roger/Dev/Virtualenvs/mynt/bin/python

from git import *
import subprocess
import os
import logging

def application(env, start_response):
        repo = Repo("/path/to/your/local/git/repo")
        origin = repo.remotes.origin
        origin.pull()
        print('Origin remote branch pulled')
        subprocess.call(["mynt", "gen",  "-f", "/path/to/your/local/git/repo", \
      "/path/to/your/mynt/generated/files"], env=os.environ.copy())
        print('Site generated')
        start_response('200 OK', [('Content-Type', 'text/html')])
        return ['Changes processed successfully !']

Launching gunicorn

Now we create a bash sript which will be in charge of launching gunicorn:

#!/bin/bash
set -e
LOGFILE=/path/to/your/log/file.log
ERRORFILE=/path/to/your/error/file.log
LOGDIR=$(dirname $LOGFILE)
NUM_WORKERS=3
#The below address:port info will be used later to configure Nginx with Gunicorn
ADDRESS=127.0.0.1:9090
# user/group to run as
USER=your_unix_user
GROUP=your_unix_group

cd /path/to/your/blog/root

source /home/roger/Virtualenvs/myntvirtualenv/bin/activate

test -d $LOGDIR || mkdir -p $LOGDIR

exec gunicorn update_mynt  -w $NUM_WORKERS --bind=$ADDRESS \
--log-level=debug \

--log-file=$LOGFILE 2>>$LOGFILE  1>>$ERRORFILE  &

As this script is meant to always run, you should launch it as a service with supervisor. Here is the supervisor config

[program:chooseAName]

directory=/path/to/the/dir/your/script/lives/in
command=bash start_gunicorn.sh
user=landry
autostart=true
autorestart=true
stdout_logfile=/var/log/supervisor/blog.log
redirect_stderr=true

Now we configure nginx to redirect requests to gunicorn:

    location /urlofyourchoice {
        proxy_pass http://0.0.0.0:9090; #The port you set gunicorn to listen to
        proxy_set_header Host $host;
        proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr;
        proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
     }

Eventually, configure Bitbucket POST hook, which is really a two-click process, and you're done !