Hugo Setup

My deployment is now (almost) entirely automated. I write Markdown files in one repo, push the changes, and my site in another repo is automatically rebuilt - changes appear to my website about a minute after my push.

Repo structure

I have two GitHub repositories I’m using for this blog:

• cnnrshd/connorshade.com - This repo holds the output of my hugo new site connorshade.com command. Everything hugo-related is here: Themes, content, images, the hugo config, etc. It is private since I use it for staging drafts.

   1~/git/connorshade.com$ tree -d -L 2
   2.
   3├── archetypes
   4├── assets
   5├── content
   6│   ├── addons
   7│   ├── post
   8│   └── service-to-shell
   9├── data
  10├── layouts
  11│   ├── _default
  12│   └── partials
  13├── public
  14│   ├── addons
  15│   ├── author
  16│   ├── categories
  17│   ├── post
  18│   ├── projects
  19│   ├── sections
  20│   ├── service-to-shell
  21│   └── tags
  22├── resources
  23│   └── _gen
  24├── static
  25└── themes
  26    └── hugo-bearcub
  

• cnnrshd/cnnrshd.github.io - This is the public repo that holds the hugo-generated content. I have it linked as a submodule within cnnrshd/connorshade.com at the path “./public”, which is the default output directory for hugo.

With this workflow I am able to keep private any drafts I want, running hugo will automatically build any changes, and with some light automation on GitHub Actions I should be able to build and deploy updates any time there is a push to cnnrshd/connorshade.com.

Theme

I’m using bear cub right now. It’s pretty light weight and doesn’t require npm to compile some HTML. I tried to use Gruvbox but the idea of installing nvm to install node to install npm to install >100 dependencies to compile a webpage is disgusting, despite how nice the page looks. I also like that bear cub is light weight (for HTML) - my webapp page is currently ~25kB, from a ~7.8kB source Markdown file, and most of the bloat seems to be styling on the code blocks.

Automation

Right now I have:

• A GitHub workflow that monitors for Pushes to cnnrshd/connorshade.com
  • On a push, the repo is checked out, a new hugo site is built, and cnnrshd/cnnrshd.github.io is updated
• Act for local testing of GitHub actions - got this idea from Beyond Fireship, who made a video titled How GitHub Actions 10x my productivity, I learned about a tool called act which allows you to run GitHub Actions locally.

GitHub Actions Workflow

Here is the content of my GitHub Actions workflow:

 1on: 
 2  push:
 3  workflow_dispatch:
 4jobs:
 5  build:
 6    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
 7    permissions:
 8      contents: write
 9    steps:
10      - name: Checkout with submodules
11        uses: actions/checkout@v3
12        with:
13          submodules: 'recursive'
14          fetch-depth: 0
15          token: ${{ secrets.WEBSITE_TOKEN }}
16      - name: List the files in the repository
17        run: |
18          ls -R          
19      - name: Download and Install Hugo
20        run: |
21          wget "https://github.com/gohugoio/hugo/releases/download/v0.116.1/hugo_extended_0.116.1_linux-amd64.deb" -O hugo.deb
22          sudo dpkg -i hugo.deb          
23      - name: Checkout master in the submodule
24        run: |
25          cd public
26          git checkout master          
27      - name: Delete everything in the public folder # Prevent errors from old files
28        run: |
29          rm -rf public/*          
30      - name: Build the website # this should write all changes to the public folder
31        run: |
32          hugo          
33      - name: Ensure the CNAME file is in the public folder
34        run: |
35          echo "connorshade.com" > public/CNAME          
36      - name: Commit and push changes to submodule
37        run: |
38          cd public
39          git config --global user.email "github-actions[bot]@users.noreply.github.com"
40          git config --global user.name "github-actions[bot]"
41          git add .
42          git commit -m "Automated submodule update"
43          git push origin master          
44      - name: Update the submodule reference in the main repository
45        run: |
46          git config --global user.email "github-actions[bot]@users.noreply.github.com"
47          git config --global user.name "github-actions[bot]"
48          git add public
49          git commit -m "Update submodule reference"
50          git push          

Most of that should be pretty self-explanatory. There is room for improvements:

• A better command to check https://github.com/gohugoio/hugo/releases/latest, look for a hugo_extended*amd64.deb, download and install that
• Right now the Action fails on “Commit and push changes to submodule” if the submodule didn’t change. This isn’t a functionality issue, but it does mean that my Actions show up as red if I do something like: updating a draft post, Change .gitignore, add a comment to the workflow. I’d like to fix this.