Hosting my site on Gitlab

I moved my blog to Gitlab Pages. Gitlab is a place to host repositories, just like Github. The main advantage of Gitlab (for me) is that it’s possible to create private projects for free.

I also switched DNS-providers to Cloudflare, mainly because it was easier to enable SSL that way than to continue using Letsencrypt.

My steps to moving the site without downtime:

• set up new project on Gitlab
• upload your code and add a .gitlab-ci.yml (and Gemfile), here’s some examples
• move DNS to Cloudflare (but still point to old server)
• setup the domain-name on Gitlab Pages (with Force domains with SSL certificates to use HTTPS turned off)
• add the TXT verification-records on Cloudflare (Name should start with _gitlab-pages and contain the domain-name, Value starts with gitlab (no underscore) and has the verification code)
  • make sure you add two records! One A-record with the IP-address (for matth-ijs.nl) and one C-Name record (for www.matth-ijs.nl), both in Cloudflare and in Gitlab!
  • Do not point DNS at your Gitlab yet!
• wait until verification
• setup the SSL-certificates
  • make sure you copy-paste the public PEM part as well!
• re-enable Force domains with SSL certificates to use HTTPS
• in Cloudflare: point the DNS to Gitlab
• everything should work (although it could take a while before SSL is up)