The earlier iteration of schuyler.info was hosted in Octopress, which was written in Ruby. One day I tried to write a new post after leaving the blog untouched for a long time, and long story short, I wound up in some kind of Ruby module dependency hell. This was like ten years ago, and it was too much. I shelved the site and never got back to it.

These days it seems like the hotness in static website generation is Jekyll, but, like, it’s Ruby. So no.

One alternative seems to be Hugo, which is written in Go and is one language I trust (sort of) to get dependencies right. I installed it on MacOS with Homebrew using brew install hugo. So far so good.

Another wrinkle was that the Octopress site was already in the master branch of the site repo. I decided to start over with a main branch using git switch --orphan as described in this Stack Overflow post followed by git commit --allow-empty.

Install Hugo

The Hugo set up instructions seem comprehensive. Need the --force flag on the directory because it already exists.

hugo new site schuyler.github.io --force

Add a theme

Okay, cool. Gotta have a theme, themes are cool. I choose BeautifulHugo. Apparently you can include the theme as a Git module but no way do I want to do that, because the source repo might go away. I don’t want updates. I want my blog to stay the same forever, nice and stable, easy to post to any old time.

It’s surprisingly challenging to checkout a bare Git repo with no history if the provider doesn’t supply a ZIP file. Fortunately I can Google for Stack Overflow results as good as anyone.

git clone --depth=1 \
    https://github.com/halogenica/beautifulhugo.git themes/beautifulhugo \
    && rm -rf themes/beautifulhugo/.git

git add themes/beautifulhugo
git commit -m "Add a static version of the BeautifulHugo theme"

Customize the theme

Now BeautifulHugo suggests starting with the example site, so that’s what I did.

cp -r themes/beautifulhugo/exampleSite/* .
hugo serve -D

The -D flag tells hugo to render draft content.

Then I went through config.toml, changing the title, subtitle, and social media links. I also commented out most of the menu.main stuff.

I added an avatar image under static/underoos.jpg and then set Params.logo to underoos.jpg. I changed the dateFormat and uncommented hideAuthor to set it to true. I disabled socialShare because ugh.

Finally I renamed content/_index.md to __index.md to remove the front matter but not delete the file because otherwise I will forget that it exists.

Write a first post

Ok. New post with hugo new posts/slug.md. Great, it prints out the file name, now I have to cut n paste it into an editor, bleh. But, it does work. Now to add this post as well.

Add .gitignore

I added a .gitignore and then checked it all in:

*.swp
*.lock

Set up Github Pages build

So, push main to origin, but now I need to add the Github Action that will actually render the site.

mkdir -p .github/workflows
cat > .github/workflows/gh-pages.yml <<End
name: github pages

on:
  push:
    branches:
      - main  # Set a branch that will trigger a deployment
  pull_request:

jobs:
  deploy:
    runs-on: ubuntu-22.04
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v3
        with:
          submodules: true  # Fetch Hugo themes (true OR recursive)
          fetch-depth: 0    # Fetch all history for .GitInfo and .Lastmod

      - name: Setup Hugo
        uses: peaceiris/actions-hugo@v2
        with:
          hugo-version: 'latest'
          # extended: true

      - name: Build
        run: hugo --minify

      - name: Deploy
        uses: peaceiris/actions-gh-pages@v3
        if: github.ref == 'refs/heads/main'
        with:
          github_token: ${{ secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN }}
          publish_dir: ./public

Don’t forget to update baseurl in config.toml like the Hugo doc says.

Also, set the site CNAME, commit and push it all up.

echo schuyler.info > static/CNAME
git add .github/workflows/gh-pages.yml static/CNAME config.toml
git commit -m "Add GH action and Pages CNAME"

Configuring a custom domain

Following this custom domain configuration doc, I need to go into the DNS for schuyler.info and make sure to set the correct IPs for the A record for my domain, and the CNAME record to point to schuyler.github.io (and not schuyler.github.com which is what it was set to, which tells you just how long ago I messed with this last).

Finally, go into Settings → Pages in Github, set the publication branch to gh-pages, set the custom domain, wait for the DNS check to succeed (eventually) and finally click Enforce HTTPS and voilá.

That was definitely not too much work. What is this, 2023 already?