monotrope/CLAUDE.md

Monotrope

Personal blog and server infrastructure for monotrope.au.

Project Structure

monotrope/
  site/           # Hugo site (content, templates, config)
  infra/          # Server setup scripts and config files
  deploy.sh       # Build + rsync to production
  Makefile        # Common tasks

Tech Stack

• Static site generator: Hugo
• Web server: Caddy (automatic HTTPS via Let's Encrypt)
• Hosting: DigitalOcean droplet (Sydney region, Ubuntu 24.04 LTS)
• Deployment: hugo build then rsync to server
• Future services: Docker Compose for anything beyond the blog

Setup Tasks

1. Initialise the repo

• Create the directory structure above
• git init with a sensible .gitignore (Hugo output dir public/, .env, etc.)
• Initialise a new Hugo site inside site/
• Use a minimal theme or no theme — we'll build templates from scratch later
• Hugo config should set baseURL = "https://monotrope.au"

2. Create a minimal Hugo site

• A single layout (layouts/_default/baseof.html, single.html, list.html)
• Minimal, clean CSS — no framework. Readable prose typography, dark mode support via prefers-color-scheme
• A sample first post in site/content/posts/ so we can test the build
• RSS feed enabled (Hugo does this by default)
• No JavaScript unless strictly necessary

3. Server provisioning script

Create infra/setup.sh — a bash script intended to be run once on a fresh Ubuntu 24.04 droplet via SSH. It should:

• Update packages
• Install Caddy via the official apt repo
• Create a www user with no login shell to own the site files
• Create /var/www/monotrope owned by www
• Install a Caddyfile at /etc/caddy/Caddyfile that:
  • Serves monotrope.au from /var/www/monotrope
  • Enables gzip/zstd compression
  • Sets sensible cache headers for static assets
  • Handles www.monotrope.au redirect to apex
• Enable and start the Caddy service
• Set up UFW: allow SSH, HTTP, HTTPS, deny everything else
• Install Docker and Docker Compose (for future use, not needed yet)
• Create a deploy user with SSH key auth and permission to write to /var/www/monotrope

Also create infra/Caddyfile as a standalone config file that the setup script copies into place.

4. Deploy script

Create deploy.sh at the repo root:

• Run hugo --minify in site/
• rsync -avz --delete site/public/ deploy@<DROPLET_IP>:/var/www/monotrope/
• Print the URL on success

The droplet IP should come from an environment variable MONOTROPE_HOST or a .env file (not committed).

5. Makefile

Targets:

• make build — build the site locally
• make serve — hugo server for local dev with live reload
• make deploy — run deploy.sh
• make ssh — SSH into the droplet as the deploy user
• make setup — run the provisioning script on a fresh droplet

Conventions

• All shell scripts should use set -euo pipefail
• Prefer clarity over cleverness in all scripts
• No unnecessary dependencies — this should stay simple
• Australian English in all content and comments
• Markdown content lives in site/content/; one subdirectory per content type (e.g. posts/, pages/)

DNS

The user will configure DNS separately via their registrar. The server expects:

• monotrope.au → droplet IP (A record)
• www.monotrope.au → droplet IP (A record)

Caddy will handle certificate provisioning automatically once DNS is pointed.

What This Is Not

• No CI/CD pipeline — deploy is manual via make deploy
• No containerisation of the blog itself — it's static files
• No database
• No analytics (for now)
• No comments system (for now)