Last week, I purchased a VPS to play around with from Bandwagonhost, a one-year plan for $19. It offers decent value for money. Here are the specs:

10 GB SSD RAID-10 Disk Space
256 MB RAM
500 GB Transfer
Gigabit port
Multiple locations

Here’s the purchase link.

After purchasing it, I first set up an SS (Shadowsocks) to bypass internet censorship. Then I thought about whether I should migrate my blog over as well, since an SS doesn’t use much traffic. So, I decided to go for it. After some searching and querying, I achieved my goal.

Here’s a simple record of the steps I took:

Client-side:#

1. Configure SSH
2. Deploy Hexo locally

Server-side:#

1. Install required software a. Git b. Nginx
2. For security and convenience, create a dedicated git user for Hexo deployment and grant appropriate permissions.
3. Configure SSH to establish a connection with the client.
4. Configure Git hooks. This way, after deploying Hexo locally to the git user’s repository on the server, you won’t need to manually copy it to the website’s access folder.

#!/bin/bash
GIT_REPO=/home/git/hexo.git #git仓库
TMP_GIT_CLONE=/tmp/hexo
PUBLIC_WWW=/var/www/hexo #网站目录
rm -rf ${TMP_GIT_CLONE}
git clone ${GIT_REPO} ${TMP_GIT_CLONE}
rm -rf ${PUBLIC_WWW}/*
cp -rf ${TMP_GIT_CLONE}/* ${PUBLIC_WWW}

5. Configure Nginx and start the Nginx service.

Issues Encountered#

1. Accessing the VPS address directly showed “403 Forbidden”. I thought it was a permission issue and searched online for a long time without a solution. Finally, I discovered that the directory used for the website was empty.
2. From issue 1, I deduced that Git hooks weren’t working at all. Since the website folder was consistently empty, I manually tested the Git hook commands. When executing rm -rf ${PUBLIC_WWW}, the system reported “operation denied”. I realized it was a permission issue and granted the git user permissions for www/hexo, the directory used for the website.
3. SSH encountered problems after the server restarted. After extensive troubleshooting, I found it was also a permission issue and granted the git user 700 permissions for the .ssh file.

After entering www.kisnows.com, the access was successful! Haha, I was so happy. Moreover, the access speed from within China was slightly faster than before, even if only by a little.

I also thought about adding SSL; otherwise, it would be too outdated, especially since telecom hijacking has been severe recently. Since I didn’t want to incur significant costs, I decided to use the free SSL provided by Cloudflare. Although only the connection between the browser and Cloudflare is encrypted, something is better than nothing. So, I switched my DNS service from DNSPod to Cloudflare, and enabled HTTPS across the entire site using Cloudflare. At the same time, I redirected the top-level domain to the www subdomain. Here’s how:

Enabling HTTPS#

Go to the Cloudflare management center, under ‘Crypto’.

Forcing Non-HTTPS Access to Redirect to HTTPS#

Located under the ‘Page Rules’ module. In image 1 above, select ‘Always Use HTTPS’, then apply the first rule as shown:

http://*.kisnows.com/*

This way, all matching requests will use HTTPS.

Redirecting Top-Level Domain to www Subdomain#

This also uses Page Rules, as shown in image 2 above. Select ‘Forwarding’, then fill in the match as follows: The $1 in ‘Forwarding’ corresponds to the element matched by * in kisnows.com/*.

With this, the two-day tinkering came to an end. The entire site has been migrated to the VPS, and HTTPS is enabled throughout. It truly is a case of ‘life never stops, neither does tinkering!’

Reference Articles: http://tiktoking.github.io/2016/01/26/hexo/ http://www.hansoncoder.com/2016/03/02/VPS%20building%20Hexo/ http://hejun.me/2015/01/05/deploy-hexo-on-cloud/