hugo-site/content/posts/site-setup.md

title	date	draft	toc	tags
Setting Up a New Site 🌃	2021-08-24T10:24:27+02:00	false	true	website config hugo git

Previously I tried using Grav with the intention to serve a simple website as it is quite easy to setup and the interface seemed quite nice. However the editing environment didn't feel good and after googling around a bit hugo already seemed a lot more appealing. It renders from markdown with some html/css config files and can serve content statically or dynamically without superfluous features.

So far it looks like I will stick with hugo and in any case a markdown source is highly portable.

Building Hugo

Hugo is actually provided by ubuntu and centos repositories but building from source is equally trivial. I went a head a built hugo from the main repository using: go version go1.15.14 linux/amd64 and placed the binary in /usr/local/bin.

git clone https://github.com/gohugoio/hugo.git
cd hugo
go install

I started off with the hermit theme and initialized a repository for this site and the theme to track changes separately. I will probably adjust the colour and type-setting to some extent. Then eventually adjusting the actual layouts and templates as we go.

Git filter

Currently I setup two branches: master which is deployed statically on leene.dev, and dev which is just for local development as I try out different things. I setup a clean-smudge git filter to manage deployment on a site-basis:

[filter "hostmgmt"]
        smudge = sed 's@\\$HOSTNAME\\$@http://localhost@'
        clean  = sed 's@http://localhost@\\$HOSTNAME\\$@'

Note if we make a change to just the filter we can re-apply it by resetting our index and checking out HEAD again.

rm .git/index
git checkout HEAD -- "$(git rev-parse --show-toplevel)"

But looking closer at the hugo documentation, it would be better to prepare a similar development and production configuration. We'll see if this can evaluate system environment variables. Alternatively you can also specify the server parameters directly.

hugo server --bind=0.0.0.0 --baseURL=http://zathura --port=1313

Planned features and content

I usually document most of my system administration work so that will be a large part of the content here but I am planning to include some technical and non-technical topics how I see fit.

First I want to setup a clean flow of generating and serving svg content for well formatted illustrations. Ideally the source code is contained in the markdown and evaluated by hugo calling some external processing components but we will see how that works. I will make some milestones as part of the repository.

Secondly I want to try a few style changes for the hermit template. Most of it is pretty good but there are a few things that I'd rather customise such as the main page and the footer.