A pile of tangled wires of different colors.

Tangled.sh

Published on August 28, 2025
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Hello everyone, I love how I made this blog but I havenā€™t had too much energy to write anything. However, I wanted to write this today since Iā€™ve moved the repository of this website to Tangled.sh. I made this change because I like supporting new projects that pop up on AtProto but also I like the idea of this website being tied to my Bluesky account more than my personal GitHub. Even though Tangled is relatively new, I found that it was pretty easy to get started and I thought Iā€™d write about some of the things I went through to get my website up and running.

SSH Keys

A thing I found pretty nice, but not surprising, was that I was able to use the same SSH key that I had been using for my GitHub. It was pretty easy to grab my public key from ~/.ssh/*.pub and add it to my registered keys in my Tangled settings. I imagine if you wanted to create a new key it would be pretty much the same steps as this.

Switching Remote URLs

Once I had my SSH key it was also very easy to take my local folder that had my original GitHub repository and switch it over to the new Tangled remote URL:

git remote set-url origin git@tangled.sh:claycow.com/claycow
git push

The only thing that was a bit weird with this was that there were always two commits that needed to be pulled in and it just wouldnā€™t resolve itself with git pull. So, I ended up running the following and it cleared them out:

git branch -r
git branch -u origin/main
git checkout -b main
git push -u origin main

Vercel & Deployment Workflow

Since Vercel doesnā€™t currently have a integration with Tangled, I had to remove my current connection with GitHub and utilize the Vercel CLI tool. I think I initially started by just reading the documentation and running vercel --prod locally which deployed successfully.

Luckily, Tangled added the ability to have pipelines, similar to GitHub Actions, earlier this month. Before I actually read the documentation on them I just saw the tab for it in the repository and enabled it. I honestly thought that it was just going to work with my .github/workflows directory but it obviously didnā€™t and I ended up having to rename the directory to .tangled/workflows. I made that push thinking it would all work from there on out but Tangled also has a different way of writing workflows compared to GitHub Actions so I fucked around way too much before finding the proper documentation (donā€™t look at my commit history, itā€™s kind of embarrassing šŸ˜…). After fiddling with the workflow for a bit I ended up with this configuration that works for this website:

when:
  - event: ["push", "pull_request"]
    branch: ["main"]

engine: nixery

dependencies:
  nixpkgs:
    - nodejs
    - perl

steps:
  - name: Deploy to Vercel
    env:
      VERCEL_TOKEN: ${{ secrets.VERCEL_TOKEN }}
      VERCEL_PROJECT_ID: ${{ secrets.VERCEL_PROJECT_ID }}
      VERCEL_ORG_ID: ${{ secrets.VERCEL_ORG_ID }}
    command: |
      npx vercel pull --yes --environment=production --token=$VERCEL_TOKEN
      npx vercel build --prod --token=$VERCEL_TOKEN
      npx vercel deploy --prebuilt --prod --token=$VERCEL_TOKEN

The above should take any website built with Nodejs and NPM with a Vercel project and deploy it. You will have to set the secrets for the CLI tool but itā€™s pretty easy after you figure out where to find them. I used part of this blog to figure out which enironment variables I needed and what to name them.

Some things I will call out is that you should specify the engine otherwise when you push it will have a warning about including it. Also, I donā€™t know whether itā€™s a required dependency for Astro or Vercel but for my current setup I had to add the perl dependency. It took me awhile to figure out what dependencies were even available to me but I think this website tells you what is available since their runner is based on NixOS.

After all that, I saw the beautiful green checkmark next to my commit and that there was a recent build on my Vercel dashboard. Once I saw that, I made my original repository on GitHub private and I made a couple small changes on my local. Once I saw that the workflow successfully sent a build request to Vercel, I was able to go to claycow.com and see the updates.

Future Plans

Now that I got this website on Tangled, I think Iā€™d like to add more things as this platform grows. Iā€™ve always felt more free to express myself through my online, furry persona so it is really nice to have a place to contribute through it now. I hope to add more repositories on Tangled in the future and collaborate with some of my Bluesky mutuals and followers šŸ™‚.

On another note, Iā€™m currently in the process of building my own server computer. Iā€™ve been wanting one for awhile now, ever since I had my Framework 13 strapped to the wall by my router at the last place I lived, and Iā€™m excited to put it together this weekend. Since Tangled allows for self-hosted Spindles, Iā€™d love to eventually help support the platform by hosting one on my new server. I donā€™t really know how it works right now, if itā€™s just hosted for me or it contributes to the network of pipeline requests, but I think itā€™d be cool to try it out.

One thing relating to the future of this website, Iā€™d like to eventually setup a way to statically build my Bluesky posts into pages as a way to keep a history, just in case Bluesky ever goes down. I think Iā€™d have to implement some form of ISR since I wouldnā€™t want to pull all my posts everytime this site needs to be built, that would take forever and be a huge waste of resources.

If you got any questions, feel free to reach out via Bluesky or message me on Signal.

Footnotes & Links

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