For the last year or so I have been maintaining my CV/Resume as a series of Markdown files stored in git. These files are then combined into a full document and output into html, pdf, docx using pandoc.

I was performing the build and publication of updates to the document manually, but as is typical of a software engineer I wanted something with a bit less friction which didn’t prevent me from making changes due the amount of work involved.

Enter Vercel - automated serverless static website publishing triggered from git commits. The process is pretty simple:

1. Tell Vercel what repository and branch to monitor (in my case, GitHub)
2. Tell it how to build
3. Tell it where the output goes
4. Setup a custom domain

Vercel has a lot of build presets, but unless you are doing something very basic you will need to override the standard build settings. This is certainly the case with Pandoc. Vercel runs on AWS and the build images are Amazon Linux 2 and use yum package management but the repositories and standard build image is very light. The suggestion to use EPEL is fair but it contains an outdated version of Pandoc.

This is how I got everything to hang together and build on Vercel. First, setup the EPEL repository as it does contain some packages we need. Then install some dependencies. In my case I am using wkhtmltopdf to generate the PDF.

yum install https://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/epel-release-latest-7.noarch.rpm
yum install wkhtmltopdf

Now we need to install a recent version of Pandoc manually from their release repository, as the version in EPEL is only 1.x at the time of writing.

yum install wget
mkdir pandoc
wget -qO- https://github.com/jgm/pandoc/releases/download/2.11.1.1/pandoc-2.11.1.1-linux-amd64.tar.gz | \
   tar xvzf - --strip-components 1 -C ./pandoc
export PATH="./pandoc/bin:$PATH"

wkhtmltopdf requires an X server, so in this case we can run it when we run wkhtmltopdf by wraping it in a shell script that starts the virtual X server prior to wkhtmltopdf being called and create a symlink so the shell script is run when wkhtmltopdf is invoked.

printf '#!/bin/bash\nxvfb-run -a --server-args="-screen 0, 1024x768x24" /usr/bin/wkhtmltopdf -q $*' \
  > /usr/bin/wkhtmltopdf.sh
chmod a+x /usr/bin/wkhtmltopdf.sh
ln -s /usr/bin/wkhtmltopdf.sh /usr/local/bin/wkhtmltopdf

Now all the pieces are in place you can run a pandoc build to generate your document.