I wanted an easy and cheap way to create and host my blog site and hugo came out on top for its ease of setup, and i decided to host it on github pages since it was free.You can find out more about github pages and hugo ,hugo is a static site generator written in GO.

This are the steps i took to host my blog post

Create and host

  • install hugo following instructions for your distro or operating system

  • install and set up git/github

  • create a new site using the command

hugo new site <name of site>
  • set up a git repo for your project
git init
  • add theme, more themes can be viewed from here themes
git submodule  add <theme>

add new content

hugo new posts/hello.md

run site

hugo server -D

create an orphan branch for github pages, using an orphan branch because it will contain content that is not simillar to the other branch

git checkout --orphan gh-pages
git reset --hard
git commit --allow-empty -m "Init gh-pages branch"
git push origin gh-pages
git checkout main

checkout gh-pages, using git worktree to push to multiple branches at once

git worktree add -B gh-pages public origin/gh-pages

push changes to gh-pages

cd public 

...

git push

set gh-pages as source

setting->pages -> sources select gh-pages

Continous deployment using Github actions

For my deployment i used github actions to build my webiste using hugo and after that deploy the public folder containing static files for the website, this is run everytime i push to the main repository.

vim .github/workflows/hugo.yml

name: Hugo

on:
  push:
    branches:
      - main

  # Allows to run workflow manually from Actions tab
  workflow_dispatch:

jobs:
  build:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - name: Checkout repository and update Hugo themes
        uses: actions/checkout@v2
        with:
          submodules: true
          fetch-depth: 0 # Fetch all history for .GitInfo and .Lastmod

      - name: Install Hugo
        uses: peaceiris/actions-hugo@v2
        with:
          hugo-version: "0.81.0"
          extended: true

      - name: Build Hugo
        run: hugo --minify

      - name: Deploy to GitHub Pages
        uses: peaceiris/actions-gh-pages@v3
        with:
          github_token: ${{ secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN }}
          publish_dir: ./public

make a change and commmit it to main to see the workflow being run and your site being deployed.

Summary

it was very easy to get a blog up and running using hugo, i needed something simple and there are lots of great templates to get started.