letsencrypt VS VuePress

For folks who use certbot, here is where they are tracking work on support for this feature: https://github.com/certbot/certbot/issues/10549

Work for this in Certbot is ongoing here, with some initial work already merged, but much to go. https://github.com/certbot/certbot/issues/3909

https://github.com/certbot/certbot/pull/10370 showed that a proof of concept is viable with relatively few changes, though it was vibe coded and abandoned (but at least the submitter did so in good faith and collaboratively) :/

Certbot runs on the EC2 instance, bound to port 80.

It's strange: SSL certificates (and maybe domain name registrations?) are one of the only "ticking time bomb" elements present in every modern web stack, whether a static site or not. By "ticking time bomb" I mean that there's a hard date N weeks/months from now where your site will definitely stop working, unless some external pile of dependencies work smoothly to extend that date.

Software didn't have that sort of "ticking time bomb" element before, I think?

I think I understand why it's necessary: we have a single, globally shared public namespace of domain names, which we accept will turn over their ownership over the long run, just like real estate changes hands. So we need expiration dates to invalidate "stale" records.

We've already switched over everything to Let's Encrypt. But I don't think anyone should be under the delusion that automation / ACME is failproof:

https://github.com/certbot/certbot/issues?q=is%3Aissue%20ren...

https://github.com/cert-manager/cert-manager/issues?q=is%3Ai...

https://github.com/caddyserver/caddy/issues?q=is%3Aissue%20A...

(These are generally not issues with the software per se, but misconfiguration, third-party DNS API weirdness, IPv6, rate limits, or other weird edge cases.)

Anyway, a gentle reminder that Let's Encrypt suggests monitoring your SSL certificates may be "helpful": https://letsencrypt.org/docs/monitoring-options/ (Full disclosure: I wrote the most recent addition to that list, with the "self-hosted scripts".)

Last I was concerned with, this was the situation:

https://github.com/certbot/certbot/issues/8345#issuecomment-...

That’s been three years though. The EFF/Certbot team has lost so much goodwill with me over that, I won’t go back.

Certbot 4 does too: https://github.com/certbot/certbot/releases

I don't understand the tone of aggression against ACME and their plethora of clients.

I know it isn't a skill issue because of who the author is. So I can only imagine it is some sort of personal opinion that they dislike ACME as a concept or the tooling around ACME in general.

We've been using LE for a while (since 2019 I think) for handful of sites, and the best nonsense client _for us_ was https://github.com/do-know/Crypt-LE/releases.

Then this year we've done another piece of work this time against the Sectigo ACME server and le64 wasn't quite good enough.

So we ended up trying:-

- https://github.com/certbot/certbot on GitHub Actions, it was fine but didn't quite like the locked down environment

- https://github.com/go-acme/lego huge binary, cli was interestingly designed and the maintainer was quite rude when raising an issue

- https://github.com/rmbolger/Posh-ACME our favourite, but we ended up going with certbot on GHA once we fixed the weird issues around permissions

This seems to be not implemented in certbot, yet: https://github.com/certbot/certbot/issues/6566

If you do go with NPM or Traefik, under the covers it's using certbot to request/renew your certificates through Let's Encrypt using the DNS-01 challenge, meaning you can get wildcard certs and don't have to futz around with port forwards. Again I'd think Caddy has similar functionality, I just have not used it personally. Raw NGINX you probably don't want to try out yet considering it requires manually doing the configs

There's no shortage of documentation tools out there, and honestly, that can make the decision harder rather than easier. After working with various clients and our own projects here at Digital Speed, we've found ourselves reaching for a handful of tools repeatedly: Docusaurus, VuePress, Redocly, and Fumadocs.

VuePress is a minimalistic Vue-powered static site generator optimized for technical documentation and websites with a focus on content. It is suitable for creating documentation websites, blogs, and other content-focused projects.

VuePress - when I searched if it's supporting what I want (conditional rendering), the first result is a bug issue opened 4 years ago, so it doesn't seem to be a good option.

I'm new to IA Writer, and I'm wanting to use it to draft posts for my Vuepress site.

VitePress is listed in the documents as VuePress' little brother, and it is built on top of Vite. For those that don't know Vite is a build tool that aims to provide a faster and leaner development experience for modern web projects so it might sense to pair it with a static site generator such as VitePress. One of the original problems with VuePress was that it was a Webpack app and it took a lot of time to spin up a dev server for just a simple doc. VitePress solves these problems with nearly instant server start, an on-demand compilation that only compiles the page being served, and lightning-fast HMR. Let's get started!

VuePress

Trying to help build a design system at work in my spare time; no clue if it will go anywhere but it’s fun regardless. I asked the Elm Slack group what the equivalent of React Storybook. Specifically, I wanted a way to build a documentation website like Vuepress with the ability to host native Elm code to showcase components. They pointed me to Elm Book. While Elm Book has built-in theming capabilities, I needed CSS control over my components. While they support elm-css, I wanted the ability to use TailwindCSS. The Elm libraries haven’t kept up with Tailwind’s changes, which is fine; writing raw Tailwind CSS on Elm HTML functions is easy and co-located with the component you’re styling.