Hugo

I’ve had the idea of a blog tumbling around my head for a while now. Not that I have anything specific to write about - more just a general thought that it could be good to write my ideas down. For a few years I’ve been doing the equivalent of an blog via email to a friend. They don’t react in anything like realtime (generally replying to a whole bunch of emails every monthish) so it’s pretty much like sending my thoughts out into the ether. This way I’ll at least have a log of what I’ve been thinking. In a binary format for ease. So a binary log. Maybe blog for short? Anyhoo. Another potential useful side effect is word retention. I keep forgetting words. I know that they exist, what they mean, how to use them, but can’t remember the actual word. While I don’t know if that even works, it seems like it’s worth a shot.

Where

While setting up my media server I decided to have 2 virtual servers - one for the media stuff (an explanation of what’s what, ruTorrent, etc.) and another as the main ahiru.pl landing page. I could have set it up with the domain register, as they threw in a static file server along with the domain, but I prefer to have control over my stuff. Even if it means that it’s more flaky (what with it being on a Raspberry Pi rather than a proper server). So I ended up with the server simply returning Nginx errors.

What

I didn’t want to hand code HTML files. Not that I couldn’t, of course, but I’m not a masochist. So I needed a HTML content server type thingy. Wordpress, Joomla etc. are way overkill for a simple blog. WSIWYG editors are nice and all, but tend to be complex. I had no need for users or a whole portal. I also didn’t need any javascript magic. Simple HTML and CSS for me, please. What I wanted was a simple an efficient static site generator. Where I’d write posts in markdown or something and generate the HTML from it.

I’d heard about a few static site generators, mainly Hugo and Jekyll. After some 2 minutes of very quick skimming I decided to give Hugo a shot. It worked fine, which was all I wanted, so for now Hugo it is.

How

Setting up Hugo took more work that I initially thought. First I tried a simple apt install hugo. Which worked fine - the project was set up without any problems and it successfully generated HTML. So then I decided to choose a theme, ending up with Cactus. Which is where the problems started. It turns out that the APT version of Hugo is quite old (as they tend to be) and Cactus wouldn’t compile without a newer version. No problem, thought I, it should be easy to manually download a newer Hugo version, right? So I went to the installation page to find instructions.

Here I should probably stop to remark that before one starts shouting at others, it’s probably best to make sure you didn’t miss anything. While writing this I decided to verify whether there really wasn’t a binary that would work on the Raspberry Pi and it turns out I’m mistaken. This seems to work fine…

Anyway - I took the long way round and first installed golang (again manually as APT was out of date), then compiled Hugo, after which Cactus didn’t report any errors.

When

Manually logging on to the Raspberry Pi each time I wanted to edit anything wasn’t a very nice prospect. So it was time for automation. I decided on a git repo which would be pulled and built every 5 minutes. Assuming that the master branch is kept sane, this should be quite a decent and scaleable solution. The only potential problem seemed to be potential conflicts if the master branch was overwritten. Yes, I know that shouldn’t happen and if it does then something is wrong, but I knew that would happen at some point. A single problematic git commit --am had the potential to break the whole build. The way I solved this was a simple (albeit ugly) force pull of the master branch before building it, using the following commands:

git fetch origin master
git reset --hard FETCH_HEAD
git clean -df
/usr/local/go/bin/hugo -D

Why

Coz why not :D

Troubleshooting

The Cactus theme won’t work without its code (duh!). So each time the blog repo gets downloaded/recreated/whatever, Cactus needs to be reinstalled. Cactus assumes there is only a posts folder for processing - to get it to properly render stuff from other folders, just copy themes/cactus/layouts/posts/ to themes/cactus/layouts/<folder name>/.