i spent the better part of the last day working on getting a second site running on my vps. it’s live now – you can see it at hyperstition.al (get it?). i got lazy about theming and just used hugo with the theme i tweaked for this blog for the moment. this writeup is mostly for reference in case anything breaks in the future.

first step was registering .al, as cheaply as possible, which i ended up doing for 13/yr with a registrar called istanco (no points for guessing the nationality). it took surprisingly long for the domain to propagate – at least six hours, i went to bed eventually. i thought that kind of latency was relegated to the old days, but i suppose that is to be expected with an albanian domain.

the next step was configuring a second virtual host on apache. this part was especially confusing because the official documentation appeared to tell me to place the edits in /etc/hosts, when they actually went in httpd.conf (apache2.conf on ubuntu). this was followed by it seeing the document root as /var/www/html instead of /var/www/hyperstition.al/public_html, which i couldn’t figure out how to fix, so i sighed and just tried to move on to configuring ssl.

lets-encrypt is some seriously magical software. i went through the motions of following a DO tutorial for configuring virtual hosts on ubuntu, and in the most baffling step in this process, running the setup script somehow managed to crash my vps. as in, i had to log into the vm cp and turn it back on. i don’t have the faintest fucking clue how this happened.

i double checked my config files, remembered to strip out the stuff i had put into my hosts file, and ran it again – voila, not only did it work without a hitch, it began serving the new domain out of the proper document root.

so, now i have a cute albanian domain hack, and it’s got forced ssl.

the next bit took an embarrassingly long time to figure out. to update this blog, i run a relatively straightforward command:

rsync -av public/ reid@artorias.pw:/var/www/artorias.pw/public_html/

however, with the new domain’s folder i kept getting error messages along the lines of

rsync: recv_generator: mkdir "/var/www/hyperstition.al/public_html/categories" failed: Permission denied (13)

i spent a good hour and a half trying to figure out what the fuck was going on, eventually figuring it had something to do with folder permissions, and trying to learn how to parse ls -l output. eventually i guessed that using chown on /var/www/hyperstition.al to change the owner ought to work, and some time after that realized that changing public_html in that folder was the real key. and, finally, all is as it should be – rsync copies everything over without a hitch.

i’m probably going to change the theme to code-editor once i get around to writing something worth posting, but for now, i’m happy that everything is still humming along. and to celebrate: indian food tonight.