Alessandro Romano's personal website

🚀 Project Structure

Inside of your Astro project, you'll see the following folders and files:

/
├── public/
│   └── favicon.svg
├── src/
│   ├── components/
│   │   └── Card.astro
│   ├── layouts/
│   │   └── Layout.astro
│   └── pages/
│       └── index.astro
└── package.json

Astro looks for .astro or .md files in the src/pages/ directory. Each page is exposed as a route based on its file name.

There's nothing special about src/components/, but that's where we like to put any Astro/React/Vue/Svelte/Preact components.

Any static assets, like images, can be placed in the public/ directory.

🧞 Commands

All commands are run from the root of the project, from a terminal:

Command	Action
npm install	Installs dependencies
npm run dev	Starts local dev server at localhost:4321
npm run build	Build your production site to ./dist/
npm run preview	Preview your build locally, before deploying
npm run astro ...	Run CLI commands like astro add, astro check
npm run astro -- --help	Get help using the Astro CLI

🐳 Docker Magic

I've added Docker containerization to this project.

It means I've added the node adapter for Astro in order to run the Server Side Rendering.

import { defineConfig } from 'astro/config';

+ import node from '@astrojs/node';
// https://astro.build/config
export default defineConfig({
+  output: 'server',
+  adapter: node({
+    mode: 'standalone'
+  })
});

Docker Context Setup

With Docker is quite easy to deploy on a remote machine instead of your own.

# Create new context for remote VPS
docker context create vps
--docker "host=ssh://user@<public-IP-address-of-your-server>"

# List available contexts
docker context ls

NOTE: I've added 2 aliases to my .zshrc to switch between local and remote contexts:

alias dlocal="docker context use default"
alias dremote="docker context use vps"

See https://x.com/kkyrio/status/1861371736492572710

To build the container: docker build -t aleromano.com .

To run the container: docker run -p 4321:4321 aleromano.com

Note: keep CONTAINER and HOST port identical otherwise /_image won't render anything

🚀 Release Process

I've streamlined the release process using npm scripts. Here's how to deploy the website:

Command	Action
npm run docker:build	Builds the Docker container locally
npm run deploy	Full deployment process on remote VPS

The deployment process consists of these automated steps:

1. Switches to Hetzner context (predeploy)
2. Builds the Docker image on the remote server (predeploy)
3. Runs the container in detached mode on port 4321
4. Switches back to local Docker context

🔍 VPS Observability

The project includes a monitoring solution for the VPS that hosts the website. This observability daemon:

• Monitors Docker container status
• Checks Docker logs for errors
• Verifies website availability
• Sends alerts via Telegram when issues are detected

For detailed documentation, installation instructions, and configuration options, see the Observability README.