In addition to this blog, I keep a private journal: a place to write unfiltered thoughts and life events that might be interesting for me to go back and read in the future. This blog is a static site built with Jekyll hosted on GitHub Pages, and for the private blog, I started with a similar setup, except:

• in a private repo instead of a public one
• not hosted publicly on the internet

My workflow was simple: when I wanted to write, I’d commit a new post and push. When I wanted to read, I’d pull the repo, run hugo serve, and browse locally. (I used hugo instead of jekyll this time around for no particular reason)

This worked fine, but it had an obvious limitation: I could only read my journal from a machine with the repo cloned and Hugo installed. The ideal solution would be a real website accessible on any device, but one that only I could read.

The Solution

I ended up using Cloudflare Pages for hosting and their Access product for authentication.

Pages is static site hosting, except that it also lets you use a private repository (GitHub Pages requires either a public repo, or a paid subscription). Like GitHub Pages, it automatically builds the site when the source repo gets pushed to.

Access lets you put an authentication layer in front of any site. You can restrict access to specific email addresses, and it handles authentication via one-time codes sent to your inbox.

Now when I visit my journal from any device, I enter my email, receive a code, and I’m in. Anyone else just sees a login page that won’t accept their address.