I Automated My Synology NAS to Generate and Deploy Tutorials Daily

A few weeks ago I started building a small tutorial website.

At first, everything was manual:

Write content

Add markdown

Run build

Restart container

It worked… but it was boring.

So I automated the entire pipeline on my Synology NAS.

Now every morning:

A Python script generates new content

The content is validated

Astro rebuilds the site inside Docker

Nginx restarts

The updated site goes live automatically

All without me touching anything.

🏗 My Stack

Synology NAS

Docker + Docker Compose

Astro (static site)

Python automation scripts

Scheduled tasks (cron-like)

🔄 The Automation Flow

Here’s the simplified flow:

Scheduled task runs every morning

Python script generates tutorials

Script validates output

Docker Compose runs Astro build

Nginx container restarts

New content is live

The rebuild takes ~1 minute.

The old version of the site keeps running until the container restarts, so there’s no downtime.

🧠 Why I Built It

Two reasons:

I wanted to learn more about automation in a real environment.

I wanted a self-maintaining content system.

It’s basically a mini CI/CD pipeline running on a NAS.

⚙️ The Rebuild Script

For those interested, this is the rebuild part:

#!/bin/bash

cd /volume1/docker/tutorialshub || exit 1

/usr/local/bin/docker compose run --rm astro-builder

/usr/local/bin/docker restart astro-nginx

Simple, but effective.

📈 What I Learned

Self-hosting forces you to understand your stack.

Automation saves mental energy.

Small systems compound over time.

Build in public works — I shared the setup on Reddit and it sparked interesting discussions.

I’m continuing to iterate on this system.

If there’s interest, I can write a deeper technical breakdown of the content generation + validation layer.

The project is live at tutorialshub.be if anyone’s curious.