How this site was made

I’m not very experianced web developer, so process of making this website was a bit frustrating. Actually, deployment was the most annoying part. Lets start with Hugo.

Hugo

Hugo is a static site generator written in Go programming language. Hugo is still in early stages, but it has good documentation and active community. Check Hugo quickstart for a short guide how to create your first website in few minutes.

Github pages

This page is hosted on github pages, as user page. Github pages quick guide.

Deployment

Deployment is done with wercker, an automation tool. This guide is a great starting point. Assuming that you have read the guide, here are some gotchas that I’ve found important:

  • Don’t forget to remove the hidden .git folder from cloned theme, as it will cause the theme to be not available in wercker environment
rm -rf themes/herring-cove/.git
  • User/organization github site is located in master branch of your repo, not gh-pages like project sites. This means that you should put your source files in different branch, I’ve done it in source branch. Master branch should be empty now, it will be overriden anyway.
git checkout --orphan source
git add .
git commit -m "Added site sources"
git push -u origin source
  • Below is my wercker.yml files. I use golang box to save few seconds on build time. Pygments are disabled to save time as well, theme I’m using has highlight.js built-in. The theme has a -clean suffix, as I forgot to remove .git from it first time. I’m using different gh-pages script, as I had trouble with the one linked in official guide with user page.
box: golang:1.5.1
build:
  steps:
    - arjen/hugo-build:
        version: "0.15"
        theme: "ghostwriter-clean"
        disable_pygments: true
deploy:
  steps:
    - install-packages:
        packages: git ssh-client
    - uetchy/gh-pages@0.3.1:
        token: $GIT_TOKEN
        domain: piotrjastrzebski.io
        path: public/

  • on wercker site, in application settings -> options -> ignored branches add master

  • in application settings -> targets -> your deploy target, change master to your custom branch, source in this example dns

Custom domain

Last piece of the puzzle, is custom domain support, if you need it. From source side, setting your domain in wercker.yml is all that is required.

    - uetchy/gh-pages@0.3.1:
        token: $GIT_TOKEN
        domain: your-domain-here
        path: public/

The hard part is, wrestling with your domain registrar to setup dns correctly. Here are the settings I’ve used: dns

Read more in github pages documentation

Final source

Current source for this website is available here.