Blogging on mobile

I want to write and publish blog posts from my mobile (which is running Android).

what is needed

Since this blog is being generated using a SSG in a CI from markdown files which life in a repo, this means I need to do the following:

1. Clone a private repo from gitlab
2. Add markdown/image files to the existing ones and edit them.
3. git add those files to the repo and git push it to origin.

The CI will do the building and publishing itself then.

I want to use only free software if possible. Especially I don’t want to use any google services like the Playstore.

Let’s go through the points inorder:

1. Clone a (private) repo from gitlab

I was optimistic that there would be a capable git client on fdroid, but I couldn’t find anything suitable. There are some vendor specific clients (like GitNex for Gitea) and git-touch looked promising (but turned out to be a tool for managing accounts, not repos)

So I went for tmux (basically a terminal with a shell for Android) and installed git by hand. It doesn’t feel very polished for mobile but at least it is a shell and I can do what I want there.

To authenticate against gitlab I created a personal access token with the scope “read_repository” and “write_repository”. Then I could use special gitlab-magic-syntax to use this token in the branches path:

git clone https://gitlab-ci-token:{TOKEN}@gitlab.com/Kaligule/schauderbasis.git

There I had my repo.

2. Add images and markdown files

There are plenty of useful image-/markdown-editors on fdroid. Notes seems to fit my usecase very well.

I had some difficulties getting the paths right in tmux. I chose to blame android and java for this. Long story short: I had to call

termux-setup-storage

in termux and move the repo into what android seems to use instead of a home directory. Strange. But now all the apps can agree on where the repo is.

3. Perform a git add and git push

We basically did all the work in step 1. Just fire up tmux and type. I didn’t find an app that could even do these simple tasks.

this post is a proof of concept

Literally. I did this whole post on my mobile.

it doesn’t feel great

Honestly, it works but it still sucks. Working with a touch keyboard as the main driver on every step is no fun. But at least everything is under control and I can replace the tools until I am happy with them.