I don’t know what I’m doing. I want to set up my own blog. I’ve been excited about using Kirby, learning whatever I need to know; I have been extremely frustrated by figuring out everything else out. My experience with programming is close to zero, though I’ve been learning on the fly, figuring out domains, hosts, the setting up of Ubuntu and various php installations. At some point though, I’ve realized I have NO clue what I’m doing and am just bouncing from webpage to webpage copying and pasting code randomly into my terminal.
So. I have:
- Settled on using DigitalOcean to host my domain.
- Settled on using ServerPilot (based on an old forum post recommendation) after trying to configure my own droplet twice.
- Created an ‘app’ on Serverpilot. Called it ‘kirby’. Set it to using PHP 8.3 as recommended by Kirby’s docs.
- Connected my SFTP with my SSH key and have determined that according to ServerPilot, my document root of my app should be, according to Serverpilot’s docs:
- I’ve delegated my domain’s DNS to DigitalOcean.
- I’ve changed my A address in Digital Ocean to the droplet’s IP address.
- Using SFTP I’ve tried upload a fresh download of kirby’s contents to what I think is the document root.
- Using Safari, at the IP address of my ‘app’ I only see the header: ‘Home’.
- Using Safari, when I put in my website’s URL, it does not load.
I am genuinely, genuinely, at my wit’s end, and about to go back to using Wordpress, or finding some sort of other service, even though the reason I started trying to learn about/use Kirby was… I wanted the customizability Kirby offers.
I suspect what I need to do is to change something in my .htaccess file, but I’m throwing in the towel. I’ve tried my best. I could do with some help.
May I ask why you decided to go with Digital Ocean instead of just choosing some shared hosting to facilitate stuff? Setting up a droplet on DO has nothing to do with Kirby in particular, and you’d probably be better off asking in their forums. I can remember that I set up a droplet once just for testing, but that’s a while ago and cannot remember, hence cannot help with it.
I went with Digital Ocean because I saw a lot of posts about people being happy with them as a service. Is there any cheap, reliable host you’d recommend?
Vancouver, Canada, so NA, West Coast
I wanted to post an update (primarily so that newbies to programming/webhosting/web development like me don’t run into the same problems):
TLDR;
- Thanks for the help (really). I’ve learned a lot, I should have checked in on whether or not I was doing things right, it’s been fun.
- I’m moving to a shared host because ultimately, there’s too much on the back-end I don’t know how to do.
- Uberspace seems like it has an ethos I agree with, so even though it’s a continent away, I’m likely to stick with it. Its pay as you want model makes it affordable for me.
- DigitalOcean was cheap, it worked at some point, but I didn’t and still don’t know enough to feel secure in what I was doing as a newcomer to all of this.
The Long Version:
- I’m setting up an Uberspace, I like what’s going on with the ethos there of pay what you can and a more communal idea. I don’t fully understand the differences between it and DigitalOcean (Shared Hosting vs a VPS?)
- I’ve figured out that at some point, I did configure at least one of my droplets correctly, and I think I configured my website correctly once I installed the prerequisite phps.
- What I didn’t do right was to set up my directory priorities for my ‘index.html’ vs ‘index.php’ files on Apache2 (or Ubuntu); I removed the index.html that came as default with Apache2, and actually, was beginning to see the correct homepage!
- Out of frustration, I’d been installing the plain kit, and so the plain ‘Home’ that I saw, was actually correct. I presumed I’d see something like the starter kit, and that was just, pardon the pun, plain wrong of an assumption for me to make. In other words, I got at least one of the droplets I was trying to work with to actually work as intended, but by then my frustration levels overshadowed my judgment to look at what the plainkit actually looked like.
- My serverpilot never managed to redirect, probably messed up something on my DNS.
- My Kirby, including the adjustment to the .config file (and the need to create it in the plainkit) for installing the panel was a brief mystery. One thing I had to figure out was that I had to keep the “<?php” at the top, based off of the .config in the starter kit.
- I’ve gotten Kirby to work on my Uberspace. Reinstalling the starter kit instead of the plain kit. Looking forward to learning more and getting around to finally building my dream website. Thanks for the help.
