20 Jan 2018

Create a blog using static site generator Hugo

This blog is (edit <2020-08-28 Fr>: was) created using Hugo, a static site generator (a nice post about this technique and its difference to dynamic pages by David Walsh) written in Go, and is hosted ob uberspace.

Get Hugo running on your local machine

get the binaries from https://github.com/gohugoio/hugo/releases
create a new site using hugo new site YOUR-SITENAME
search for a theme on https://themes.gohugo.io/, clone it, and copy it into the themes folder [create the folder if it is not available]
edit the config.toml and change the fields according to your information
run hugo new post/YOUR-NEW-POST.md
run hugo server (or hugo server -D when your post is still a draft -> check in the toml header of the file) to visit your site at localhost and test/adapt your post and theme

Version control your blog with git

Local

in the root directory of the blog run git init
add all files using git add . and git commit -m "initial commit"
optional: create a .gitignore file and write all names of these files and folders you do not want to upload to the server (e.g. automatic backup files)
Create a bare git repository that can be send to the server. To do this, leave the blog root directory (cd ..) and run git clone --bare YOUR-LOCAL-GIT-BLOG-FOLDER YOUR-SERVER-GIT-BLOG-FOLDER.git
copy the newly created bare repository to your server (e.g. using scp)
move again into your local blog folder and add the remote address to your blog using git remote add origin SERVERADRESS:REPOSITORY-FOLDER

Server

ssh into your server
cd into the hooks folder of your blog directory
using your favorite editor (what is without doubt emacs) create a file named post-receive and add the following content:

#!/bin/bash -l
GIT_REPO=$HOME/your-blog.git
TMP_GIT_CLONE=$HOME/tmp/git/your-blog.git
PUBLIC_WWW=/var/www/virtual/$USER/html

git clone $GIT_REPO $TMP_GIT_CLONE
hugo $TMP_GIT_CLONE
cp -r $TMP_GIT_CLONE/public/ $PUBLIC_WWW
rm -Rf $TMP_GIT_CLONE
exit

make the hook file executable chmod u=rwx post-receive
test whether everything is working by manually executing the hook file .post-receive
when everything works leave the server and enjoy writing of your site locally. After you pushed your changes to the server the site will be generated automatically

Links

The information above was collected from these sources:

Hugo:

Uberspace [note that the instructions are for jekyll – and in German.]:

Git:

dakni.eu