Sakar Labs Blog

A fast, static technical blog for the Sakar Labs team — weekly posts on software and AI. Built with Astro, served as static files by nginx.

Write a post

1. Create src/content/blog/<your-slug>.md:

   ---
   title: "Your Post Title"
   description: "One-sentence summary shown on the home page."
   publishDate: 2026-07-08
   author: ishan            # must match a file in src/content/authors/
   tags: [AI, Performance]
   draft: false             # set true to keep it out of the build
   ---
   
   Your post in Markdown. Fenced code blocks are highlighted automatically.

2. Add yourself as an author once — src/content/authors/<you>.md:

   ---
   name: "Your Name"
   role: "Your Role"
   ---
   
   One-paragraph bio.

3. Commit and open a PR (or push). A bad post (missing field, unknown author) fails the build, so broken posts never ship.

The site has these pages: home (latest posts), individual post pages, /tags and /tags/<tag>, and /authors/<id>.

Local development

npm install
npm run dev      # http://localhost:4321
npm run build    # outputs the static site to dist/
npm run preview  # serve the production build locally

Run with Docker Compose (local / dev)

docker compose up -d --build   # builds and serves on http://localhost:3060
docker compose down            # stop and remove the container

The mapped port lives in docker-compose.yml (3060:80). Change the left number to serve on a different host port.

Deploy (Docker on the Azure VM)

docker build -t sakarlabs-blog .
docker run -d -p 80:80 --restart unless-stopped --name sakarlabs-blog sakarlabs-blog

To redeploy after new posts land:

git pull
docker build -t sakarlabs-blog .
docker rm -f sakarlabs-blog
docker run -d -p 80:80 --restart unless-stopped --name sakarlabs-blog sakarlabs-blog

The image is a two-stage build: node:lts-alpine compiles the site, then nginx:alpine serves the static output (final image ~30–50 MB, no Node at runtime).

TLS / HTTPS (follow-up)

v1 serves plain HTTP on port 80. To add HTTPS, put a reverse proxy in front (Caddy with automatic Let's Encrypt, or nginx + certbot) terminating TLS and forwarding to this container. Not included in v1.

Roadmap (deliberately out of v1)

Easy to add later: RSS feed, dark mode, full-text search, comments, newsletter signup, and pagination.

Stack

Astro 5 · Shiki (build-time syntax highlighting) · nginx · Docker

Project docs

Design spec and implementation plan live in docs/superpowers/.