Building a Blog with Elixir and Phoenix

Summary

TL;DR: it’s an Elixir app using Phoenix server side rendered pages, with the blog post pages generated from Markdown using NimblePublisher. It’s running on a self-hosted Dokploy instance running on Hetzner, with bunny.net as a CDN sitting in front of it. This is a very belated write up of how this blog was put together! There’s nothing terribly original here, but I figure it could come in handy for someone out there as a reference. And the world needs more Elixir content. Why Phoenix I have used static site generators before to power my blog (shoutout to Hakyll), but I wanted to open the door for myself to also have little experiments on this site, ones that would require more interactivity than a static site allows. Besides, I just like using Phoenix. Although most of my Phoenix projects use LiveView, this felt like a good place to do things old-school with DeadViews. It also means I get full control of what I’m building. Using a tool someone else created means getting a lot for free, but the moment you step outside of the expected you’re having to figure out how to make things work for their tool. So I kept things simple. No Ecto, no DB. Just server-side rendered HTML. It’s blazingly fast, as you can see from this PageSpeed Insights report. NimblePublisher My setup closely matches the original Dashbit blog post Welcome to our blog: how it was made!, which led to the creation of NimblePublisher. The heart of the blog is the NimblePublisher setup, which consists of a use block: defmodule JolaDev.Blog do use NimblePublisher, build: JolaDev.Blog.Post, from: Application.app_dir(:jola_dev, "priv/posts/**/*.md"), as: :posts, html_converter: JolaDev.Blog.MarkdownConverter, highlighters: [:makeup_elixir] ... This will load up all the posts, parse the frontmatter, run it through the markdown converter, and compile it into module attributes. This means there’s no work left to be done at runtime, it’s all pre-compiled. Posts are organized by year: priv/posts/2025/08-18-ruthle...