Blog | MARDA SCIENCE

This website

May 13, 2021 · 3 min read

Dan Buscombe

Chief Webber @ Marda

How did we set up this Marda science website? It was a rocky road ... we initially paid for a commercial WordPress hosting which was, well, let's just say awful and move on!

Next, we wanted something easy, free, and just code.

I decided to use github's free gh pages web hosting service, which also provides an ssl certificate through letsencrypt. For web pages, I went with docusaurus, which is meant for documentation but works great for simple webpages such as these, with a relatively shallow learning curve. There's a little bit of javascript, a bit of css, and some markdown. Then its all about git, and confusing web stuff.

Github#

First I set up this github repository

git clone https://github.com/MARDAScience/web.git
cd web

Docusaurus#

Generated a classic v2 docusaurus website template:

npx @docusaurus/init@latest init website classic

Switched to the newly created website directory:

cd website
npx docusaurus start

(started writing the website)

Pushed it to github

Git add .
Git commit -m “your commit msg here”
Git push origin main

Pushed website to gh-pages like so:

GIT_USER=MARDAScience CURRENT_BRANCH=main yarn run deploy

At which point the website was visible at https://MARDAScience.github.io/web/

Custom Domain#

I transferred the domain name, "mardascience.com", from the awful hosting service we had naively gone with previously, to namecheap.

In namecheap, under the domain listing, I used the "Advanced DNS" tab to add these “A records” (host for each is @)

host=@, value=185.199.108.153
host=@, value=185.199.109.153
host=@, value=185.199.110.153
host=@, value=185.199.111.153

(those IPs were obtained from here and apparently change every so often)

I also added the following CNAME record

host=www
value=mardascience.github.io.

(not the trailing dot after io)

Back to Docusaurus#

The top of the docusaurus.config.js file should look like

module.exports = {
  title: 'Marda Science',
  tagline: '{Communications | Analytics | Training} for the {Marine | Earth | Life} Sciences',
  url: 'http://mardascience.com',
  baseUrl: '/',
  onBrokenLinks: 'throw',
  onBrokenMarkdownLinks: 'warn',
  favicon: 'img/favicon.ico',
  organizationName: 'MARDAScience', // Usually your GitHub org/user name.
  projectName: 'web', // Usually your repo name.

Add a CNAME file to both the root (web) and /website/ that says, simply

www.mardascience.com

(note the www. is included)

Push it to github:

Git add .
Git commit -m “msg”
Git push origin main

Push website to gh-pages

GIT_USER=MARDAScience CURRENT_BRANCH=main yarn run deploy

Back to Github#

On github pages, add custom domain name: