Initial commit: Astro blog scaffold with CI/CD

src/content/posts/how-i-host-this-blog.md

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+---
+title: "How I host this blog: Astro, Gitea Actions, and self-hosted CI/CD"
+description: "A walkthrough of the end-to-end pipeline that builds and serves this site — git-as-CMS, a self-hosted runner on my unRaid server, and Cloudflare in front."
+pubDate: 2026-09-06
+category: case-studies
+tags: [astro, gitea, ci-cd, self-hosting, docker, cloudflare]
+lang: en
+---
+
+This blog is itself a project I built to demonstrate the kind of work I do.
+Here's the full pipeline, so the architecture is transparent.
+
+## The stack
+
+- **Astro 5** — static site generated from Markdown.
+- **Git as the CMS** — every post is a `.md` file with YAML frontmatter, versioned in [git.hoelee.com](https://git.hoelee.com/hoelee/hoelee-blog).
+- **Gitea Actions** — a self-hosted CI runner (`act_runner`) on my unRaid server builds the site on every push to `main`.
+- **nginx** — a dedicated container serves the static `dist/` output.
+- **Cloudflare** — the tunnel exposes it publicly, and the CDN caches everything.
+
+## Why static + git?
+
+A technical blog has no dynamic content. Writing in Markdown, reviewing via
+pull request, and rebuilding on merge gives me:
+
+1. Full version history of every word I publish.
+2. No database or admin panel to secure or patch.
+3. Near-perfect performance — pre-built HTML, no server-side rendering.
+
+## The deploy flow
+
+```
+git push → Gitea webhook → act_runner picks up the job
+  → npm ci → astro build → copy dist/* to docroot → nginx serves it
+```
+
+The whole thing runs on hardware in my homelab, which is exactly the point —
+this is a live demo of the DevOps work I describe elsewhere.
+
+## Coming up
+
+Future posts will cover the individual pieces in depth: the `act_runner`
+container setup, the Cloudflare cache rules, and the i18n routing for the
+Chinese side of this site.