I moved my blog from Jekyll to Hugo because I can’t leave well enough alone.
Jekyll is wonderful, it’s also slower than it should be for building a site. Not like “go get some coffee” slow, but building felt sluggish. I also needed to reconfigure my workflow for publishing anyway. My earlier workflow involved running Jekyll client-side, keeping the resulting _site folder in version control and deploying that.
Trust me, it made a lot of sense when I was setting it up. However, it quickly started to show its fragility.
My primary goal was to have the server generate the site itself so I needed to start from scratch anyway. This seemed like a good opportunity to try Hugo. I also wasn’t running ruby on my webserver yet and, frankly, installing Hugo was a lot easier than the full ruby setup:
sudo apt install hugo
And that was about it for setup on the server.
Hugo and Jekyll both use markdown files to generate the site and their frontmatters are similar enough that the transition to Hugo was incredibly simple.
Fast forward through a lot of futzing with config files, themes, and testing builds.
I eventually landed on this: I keep the project in version control and .gitignore the exported site from the repo. The site can still be built locally if needed with hugo serve but when the project is commited it ignores the exported site. After the commit is pushed to the server it runs the following post-recieve hook:
#!/bin/sh
#Checkout the repo to a temporary build folder
git --work-tree=/var/repos/hugoblog/tmpbuild/ --git-dir=/var/repos/hugoblog/ checkout -f
#Build the site
hugo -s /var/repos/hugoblog/tmpbuild/
echo "\n\nBlog has been built. Moving it to chrissalzman.com/blog\n\n"
#Then move the public folder to the right place
rsync -r /var/repos/hugoblog/tmpbuild/public/ /var/www/chrissalzman.com/blog
Nothing terribly fancy and this will likely get modified into the future. It checkouts the project to a folder, runs Hugo, tells me it worked, then moves it over with rsync.
Note
I did run into a theme issue with git that stumped me for a bit. The theme was cloned in using git. Since it had its own git repo it wasn’t getting tracked by the project’s git repo. After pushing it to the server hugo was generating a blank site since the theme was blank.
My fix was to copy/paste the theme into a differently named folder, update config.toml to that theme folder, and then add another commit. After that it worked. I’m sure this is the sort of thing that could be solved leveraging git in some way I don’t quite understand, but this was easier for me. I also anticipate designing my own theme.