Migrating from Blogger to GitLab Pages

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It’s been several years since Blogger turned on HTTPS, but only for https://[yourbloghere].blogger.com/ resourced blogs. It continues to not support HTTPS for custom domain blogs. While what I post does not need the same level of authorization, authentication, and crytographic controls as a commerce site, it would be nice to encrypt everything. There are a number of options and I initially leaned towards using GitHub. Unfortunately, it suffers from the same problem for its pages as blogger- TLS, except for custom domains. GitLab, while similar to GitHub, does support HTTPS for custom domains, and uses the same git framework. In the end, that’s where I’ve gone.

What I ended up going with is the following:

All scripts and testing were performed from a MacBook Pro running OS X 10.11, but should work from any Linux machine with minimal changes.

Another option that I had not explored for TLS-enabled static hosting with custom domains is Firebase. The Google acquired property relaunched in May 2016. The service appears to primarily be a mobile app development and backend platform, that also provides static page hosting.

Steps for Migration

Pulling a Backup

It’s fairly simple to get your posts out of Blogger. Under Settings > Other is a Back up Content button. Clicking this will generate an XML file that will be downloaded by your browser. See this for more details.

Setup Jekyll with hpstr theme

From the theme setup steps:

  1. Download a zip of the theme.
  2. Unpack the theme: $ unzip master.zip
  3. cd hpstr-jekyll-theme-master
  4. Install bundler: $ sudo gem install bundler
  5. Install jekyll: $ sudo gem install jekyll
  6. Install theme dependencies: $ bundle install
  7. Edit the _config.yml to personalize your site.
  8. Run $ jekyll serve to locally host the site. You can view in your broswer at http://localhost:4000/

If you have difficulty installing/running Jekyll, you can look here for more help.

Convert from XML to HTML

The Blogger backup will get saved as an XML file named blog-mm-dd-yyyy.xml. Jekyll has a number of importing tools. In this case, I used the Blogger specific gem. You need to install it by running:

$ sudo gem install jekyll-import

Afterwards you can run the following with requisite local modifications.

$ ruby -rubygems -e 'require "jekyll-import";
    JekyllImport::Importers::Blogger.run({
      "source"                => "/path/to/blog-MM-DD-YYYY.xml",
      "no-blogger-info"       => false, # not to leave blogger-URL info (id and old URL) in the front matter
      "replace-internal-link" => false, # replace internal links using the post_url liquid tag.
    })'

The above converts the monolithic XML file into individual HTML files stored in a _posts and _drafts directories. At this point you could copy the contents of _posts to your local Jekyll/hpstr repository and move on to the steps to get the site on GitLab. Unfortunately for me the resulting HTML was something of an uneditable mess. The new pages rendered inconsistently. The content itself typically ending up a whitespaceless hodgepodge HTML, CSS, and content.

So, I wrote a script to further munge the HTML and output the result to more human readable markdown format.

Convert HTML to Markdown

A search for HTML to Markdown scripts and routines brings up a lot of things that go the other direction. But since we’ve already mucked around with enough Ruby, might as well just install the available gem.

$ sudo gem install html2markdown

To convert one file you could run:

$ cat {YourHTMLFile.html} | ruby -e 'require "html2markdown"; puts HTMLPage.new(contents: STDIN.read).markdown' > {destination.md}

That could get tedious quickly. A simple way to cycle through your html files would be to run:

for i in `ls *.html`; do
   fname=`basename $i | sed -e 's/\.html$//'`
   cat ${i} | ruby -e 'require "html2markdown"; puts HTMLPage.new(contents: STDIN.read).markdown' > ${fname}.md
done

Still, this was not satisfactory as the routine seemed to not handle code snippets, HTML pre tags, or images with captions well or at all. I ended up further refining the above snippet to do some minor pre-processing of the HTML and then alterations to the resulting markdown. I took the opportunity to perform one other modification to my pages as well. The script I wrote also downloads all images referenced in the original HTML and updates the img references.

The script, html-reform.sh, is available on my GitLab repo. Either download the zip or clone the repository. You will minimally need to edit the workDir value to match where your _posts and _drafts directories ended up after converting your Blogger XML backup.

Once editted, you can run $ ./html-reform.sh and it will process all the html files in the _posts directory and save the .md files in _md and downloaded images in images/posts.

The image download process is somewhat space inefficient. In order to avoid naming collisions, the script saves the images as:

[post-name]-[image-name-without-extention][optional counter].[extention]

This gets around the problem of different size versions of the same image or different images with the same name from different URI paths.

After running the script, you can copy your new markdown files and images to your local Jekyll/hpstr repository. For example, by running the following from your workDir:

$ cp _md/* ../hpstr-jekyll-theme-master/_posts/ 
$ mkdir -p ../hpstr-jekyll-theme-master/images/posts/
$ cp images/posts/* ../hpstr-jekyll-theme-master/images/posts/

Setup GitLab

For a more thorough look at setting up GitLab pages read the blog post and associated Pages readme.

The basic steps are:

  1. Create a Project in GitLab names [useraccount].gitlab.io
  2. Clone the project.
  3. Copy your local website into the project:
    • cd [local website directory] && cp -r ./ [cloned project directory]/
  4. Go to your [useraccount].gitlabs.io directory.
  5. Prepare a .gitlabs-ci.yml file.
    • vi .gitlabs-ci.yml
    • With the hpstr theme, we load some additional gems beyond basic Jekyll:

      image: ruby:2.3
      
      pages:
        script:
        - gem install json
        - gem install rouge
        - gem install jekyll
        - gem install jekyll-sitemap
        - gem ainstall jekyll-feed
        - gem install jekyll-paginate
        - gem install jekyll-gist
        - jekyll build -d public
        artifacts:
          paths:
          - public
        only:
        - master
       * _Note:_ The above example does not include bits I used for [Let's  Encrypt](https://letsencrypt.org) cert validation.  That's a future post.
      
  6. Make sure you have a decent .gitignore. The contents of mine are:

     *~
     .*.swp
     .DS_Store
     _site
     *.sublime-project
     *.sublime-workspace
     codekit-config.json
     node_modules
     Gemfile.lock
     .sass-cache
     .jekyll-metadata
    
  7. Add the files to the repo.
    • git add .
    • git commit -a -m 'initial commit'
    • git push
  8. After pushing, you can check on the GitLab Pipeline for your project to what the build. GitLab Pipeline

    You can always click on the status of the build to get further details, including the output from the CI process, and an error messages if the build failed. I had a couple of occassions seen builds fail because of timeouts pulling the gems.

  9. Once the Status changes from running to passed you can see you pages at https://[useraccount].gitlabs.io/

Configure a Custom Domain

domains

The docs here are very good, but there are a couple of things to keep in mind.

  • Understand and have control of your DNS.
  • If you plan on using TLS, then you’ll need your certificates in .pem format ready before hand.
  • You can’t change an existing pages domain, only view details, or remove it. To modify an existing domain, you must remove it from GitLab, then add it back which is a little annoying. Pages Issue: 341
  • GitLab does not enforce TLS. My work around is described here.

Summary

At this point you should now have a copy of your content up on GitLab. Managing it is simply a matter of using your favorite text editor (even the GitLab WebUI) and git check-ins.

In a follow-up post, I will describe how I use Let’s Encrypt’s tools to add an TLS/SSL cert for my custom domains. This will touch on the “fun” of running certbot manually, the steps to authenticate ownership of the domain(s), and how I’m automating cert renewal.

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