briananders.com

My personal website, built as a custom static site generator.

Tech Stack

• Templating: EJS (Embedded JavaScript) for HTML generation
• Styling: Node-Sass for CSS pre-processing
• Scripting: Browserify + Babel for JS bundling and transpilation
• Local Dev: Express + http-proxy-middleware for local serving

Project Structure

• src/: Core source files including JS, Sass styles, and EJS templates.
• build/: The custom Node.js build system tools (bundlers, asset movers, page mappings).
• test/: Node.js native test scripts (build.test.mjs, golden.test.mjs).
• package/: The output directory for the optimized production build.
• golden/: The output directory for the unoptimized golden build (skips gzip/hashing).

Installation steps

1. Install XCode command line tools: xcode-select --install
2. Install homebrew. (see: brew.sh)
3. Install homebrew dependencies: brew bundle
4. Install node: nvm install
5. Set node version: nvm use
6. Install npm packages: npm install

Scripts

Development

• npm start: Build and launch the dev site at http://localhost:3000. (Stop the server with Ctrl+C.)
• npm run scaffold --path=/my-page: Scaffolds boilerplate CSS, EJS, and JS files for a new page.
• npm run lint:src / npm run lint:build: Run ESLint on the source or build directories.
• npm run visual-diff: Runs the visual regression diffing script using Playwright/Puppeteer.

Building

• npm run build: Build the site for production into the /package folder, including file compression and gzip.
• npm run build:golden: Build the site into the /golden folder without gzip compression and asset hashing.

Testing

• npm test: Runs the Node.js native test runner suite on the build processes.

Deploy the static site

My website uses AWS as the host, and the deploy uses the modular AWS SDK for JavaScript v3 (@aws-sdk/client-s3, @aws-sdk/lib-storage, @aws-sdk/client-cloudfront). For this to work you need credentials saved as bash variables:

• CLOUDFRONT_ID
• AWS_ACCESS_KEY
• AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY
• AWS_REGION (optional; defaults to us-east-1 for S3—set this if your bucket lives in another region)

DO NOT SHARE YOUR CREDENTIALS WITH ANYONE. DO NOT COMMIT THEM TO A PUBLIC REPO.

• npm run stage: Deploys the site to the staging S3 bucket.
• npm run deploy: Deploys the site to the production S3 bucket.