The SBML Team runs a live development server so that we can all see a preview of any changes planned for the production site (the actual SBML.org). Here is how that development server is set up.
The current server is a CentOS system. The computer is set up as a fairly basic CentOS server, and runs only a couple of services. It allows ssh connections only from Caltech IP addresses. It runs haproxy as a front-end for web connections and to support SSL.
On our development server, we download and store copies of the Hugo software in /usr/local/src/HOSTNAME/hugo and the Hugo binary itself is /usr/local/bin/hugo.
For security reasons, we do not run the Hugo server as root. There is a separate system account for running hugo.
On CentOS and similar Linux systems, non-root processes cannot bind to port numbers below 1024. If you want to use port 80 for a server, you need to adjust the security settings. Several alternatives exist. One particularly easy way to do it (if you can afford the security risks) is to use setcap. For example, if your copy of hugo is /usr/local/bin/hugo,
setcap 'cap_net_bind_service=+ep' /usr/local/bin/hugo
This must be performed after every update of the Hugo executable.
The files for the copy of the SBML site are located in /home/hugo/sbml/. A shell script (admin/server-control) allows manually starting/stopping the Hugo server.
The server computer is configured to start the SBML Hugo server automatically upon reboot, using standard CentOS 7 operating system facilities. Doing this involves configuration files for systemd and others. The setup is described in server-setup.md.
The site copy is automatically updated whenver changes are committed to the develop branch on GitHub. This is accomplished by a script that runs on the server computer and periodically checks for new changes in the GitHub repository. The script is update-from-github, and on our development server, it is invoked from the system cron program on a 5 minute interval. The cron entry looks like this:
*/5 * * * * /home/hugo/sbml/admin/update-from-github develop >> /var/log/hugo/github-updates.log 2>&1
To check the version of the git repository that was last used to create the site contents on the development server, you can look at https://SERVER/site, where SERVER is the host name of the SBML.org development server.