I did some work following these instructions written by Chris Dadswell for setting up my own Fargo Publisher server, and got it sorta working. No where ready for prime time though.

I did encounter an error with the instructions for installing node.js on Debian. After I followed the instructions, node.js was not running and the reason is that there is a step missing. According to the instructions I found on Github, the last step is:

  • sudo dpkg -i node_*

One thing that I do not understand is, what is the relationship between fpDomain and what you provide in the Server field of the CMS Settings in Fargo. Right now, I am seeing some intermittent results depending on what I enter in the Server field of CMS Settings. The instructions that Dave provides suggest they need to be the same, but that doesn't align with how I understand how everything is set up.

My confusion may be partly caused by what Dave refers to about domains for users accounts. As is the "default" configuration of Fargo, the URLs for published blogs appears to be a CNAME associated with smallpict.com. The CNAME is the same as the name assigned to an outline and most be unique per instance of the fargoPublisher.

For example, the name of the outline in which I am writing these notes is frank-notes and the URL to the published blog for this outline is frank-notes.smallpict.com. It looks as though in order for DNS to find the blog, a CNAME record of frank-notes is created for domain smallpict.com and is configured to point to [S3 bucket name]/users/[outline name].

Based on my understanding of fargoPublisher, I expect that in this set up fpDomain=smallpict.com and I would expect that would also be in the Server field of the CMS Settings in Fargo, but instead the default server is pub.fargo.io. Or in other words, Dave's instances of fargoPublisher is running on smallpict.com, but if that is true, then how is the Server field different, I think it has to be the same as fpDomain.

I may be wrong about smallpict.com and I am just seeing some DNS & CNAME usage to cover up the S3 bucket path to the rendered blog pages, in which case fpDomain is likely set to either pub.fargo.io or fargo.io. BUT the example deployment instructions Dave has on Github shows fpDomain as smallpict.com.

I think are more clues to piecing this all together are in the Github instructions and the Google group.

07/13/14; 10:11:43 PM

Last built: Wed, Feb 17, 2016 at 3:27 PM

By Frank McPherson, Sunday, July 13, 2014 at 10:11 PM.