Abbey Root Leaves the House
AbbeyRoot.com moved from an internal sites01 release to its first public, HTTPS-served home.
Tags: abbey • abbeyroot-com • publishing • sites01 • infrastructure
Abbey Root Leaves the House
AbbeyRoot.com is public.
It still needs work, which is probably the most honest possible state for an Abbey website to launch in. The point was not to declare the project finished. The point was to give it a real home and stop treating the website like a permanent internal preview.
The site now running at AbbeyRoot.com is the rebuilt version that separates Abbey from BradCooke.com. BradCooke.com keeps the personal projects, Orchid Rescue, the Museum, and its own new journal. AbbeyRoot.com keeps Abbey’s engineering story and the complete historical journal that shows how those sites grew together and eventually split apart.
That history matters. Moving every old entry into a perfectly classified final home would make the result cleaner, but it would also erase the development path. The Abbey journal is allowed to show its seams.
The deployment followed the release workflow Abbey gained earlier today.
On ubuntu-dev01, Abbey built 158 pages, validated the home page and journal,
checked the remote target, and previewed the transfer without changing
anything. The real publish then uploaded the generated site into a timestamped
release on sites01, compared the remote files with the artifact that had
already passed validation, and moved the current symlink only after they
matched.
The active release became:
/srv/www/abbeyroot.com/releases/20260812T234126Z
The original bootstrap release stayed in place as the rollback target.
Publishing the files was only half of making the site public. The domain still
pointed at Hostinger, while sites01 was intentionally available only inside
the lab.
The public path now runs through the existing edge:
abbeyroot.com -> home router -> Nginx Proxy Manager -> sites01
Nginx Proxy Manager accepts abbeyroot.com and www.abbeyroot.com, terminates
HTTPS with a Let’s Encrypt certificate, redirects plain HTTP to HTTPS, and
forwards the request to native nginx on sites01. The router still exposes
only ports 80 and 443 to the proxy host. The management interfaces and SSH did
not become public just because the website did.
There was one very small piece of archaeology during the DNS cutover. The old A record had a 50-second TTL, but Hostinger’s current editor requires at least 60 seconds. Ten additional seconds of patience was the price of progress.
Both public names now resolve to the reverse proxy. The proxy returns the deployed Abbey site over HTTP/2, and the HTTP version redirects to HTTPS.
This is not the final AbbeyRoot.com design. It is the first version with the right responsibilities, the right content boundary, and a deployment path I trust.
That is enough to put it on the internet.