A comprehensive guide to creating your own Grav Blog!
Welcome to the exciting world of CMS hosting! If you're here, it means you're in setting up your very own Grav CMS blog. Congratulations! This guide will take you from zero-to-hero, offering a step-by-step walkthrough to get you set up with your own blog!
Understanding CMS and Grav
Grav is a CMS, or Content Management System, and it is going to be the backbone of your blog. If you've dabbled in platforms like WordPress, you already have a basic understanding of the concept.
Grav CMS, however, departs from the traditional LAMP (Linux, Apache, MariaDB, PHP) structure to a more lightweight LAP structure.
The reason that Grav is such a lightweight CMS is that it does away with the need for a full database, meaning this is more a LAP CMS. This will make your blog cheaper to run, by utilising a flat file structure as opposed to a database to store your entries and media.
This guide will cover 4 distinct stages of the setup, each with their own challenges and skills you will develop along the way.
Our Plan Of Attack
1) AWS EC2 setup
- This stage will introduce you to the AWS cloud hosting platform
- You will get set up with your free account, if you don't already have one
- You will learn some basic AWS resources required for this setup
- You will then set up your own EC2 instance on which to host the blog!
2) Ubuntu Setup
- Now that you have an EC2 instance set up, it's time to get it installed with everything we need to set up Grav
- You will learn some basic Ubuntu navigation commands
- You will install the Apache and PHP packages to your instance
- You will install Grav to your instance
3) Getting started with Grav CMS
- This is what you've been waiting for! We will begin setting up our brand new Grav CMS blog
- You will create your first account, your first post, and learn some Grav CMS basics
- We will then look at some optional plugins and themes to give a more customised experience to your blog
4) Additional Bonus Steps
- In this step we will look at some extra stretch goals for setting up the blog
- You will register a custom Domain Name to navigate to the blog
- You will register the blog with a signed SSL certificate to allow HTTPS traffic
- There may be more goals here too!
If this all sounds interesting to you, feel free to navigate to the first article below to begin reading! Or skip to the step that is most relevant to you!