I talk about restoring backups often recently. This is because the disk on my trusty bare-metal server died. This gave me the opportunity to reassess my hosting choices, and do the ground work to move from where it was to where I want it to be.
One of those changes is moving static website hosting away from a Apache HTTPd, running on an OS I administrate (read: “frequently broke”), to a more focused and hands-off system in the cloud, AWS S3 with a CloudFront CDN (more on this in a later post).
Unfortunately, decades of running Apache have left me with a number of static sites using some on-the-fly templating by relying on Server-side Includes (SSI). Headers, footers, geeky IPv6 and last-modified tags, … none of those work with a truly static host. I needed a solution to render those snippets into full pages.
At first, I thought I’d just write a simple parser in Python. I quickly gave up on the idea, however, when I realised I used included templates with parameters. Pretty nifty stuff, but also not trivial to write a parser for.
Then I realised I already had the perfect parser: Apache. All I needed was to let it render all the pages one last time, and publish those instead! This was packed quickly with a relatively simple Docker container, and the trusty wget. The busy person can find a Gist of the Dockerfile here.