Migrating from WordPress to Hugo

So after a little tinkering around and looking at options for something different I decided to swap to Hugo. Why Hugo? Because I wanted to not just swap CMS but also try out more with Github’s Actions (CD/CI), essentially I have combined both those at the same time.

The How

So Hugo is basically a static site generator that can pull data from any number of different sources, compile them via templates into a static site. With that in mind, I looked into GitHub’s Actions a little more to see if I could automate the deployment.

CD/CI Actions

The actions are pretty simple to deploy with Hugo. For myself I am using SCP to copy files from the generated action environment to place them on a remote server (this one), below is a copy of the workflow file.

name: Hugo Deploy

on:
  push:
    branches: [ master ]

jobs:
  # This workflow contains a single job called "build"
  build:
    name: Build
    # Runner type
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    # Sequence of tasks
    steps:
    # Checks-out the repo
    - uses: actions/checkout@v2
    # Setup Hugo
    - name: Setup Hugo
      uses: peaceiris/actions-hugo@v2
      with:
        hugo-version: '0.72.0'
    # Build Hugo
    - name: Build Hugo
      run: hugo -D --minify
    # Copy files to remote
    - name: Copy Repo files to remote dest
      uses: appleboy/scp-action@master
      with:
        host: ${{ secrets.HOST }}
        username: ${{ secrets.USERNAME }}
        port: ${{ secrets.PORT }}
        key: ${{ secrets.KEY }}
        source: "./public"
        target: "~/blog"

It’s a pretty simple and straight forward set of actions. To break it down:

1. It makes an environment that is ubuntu based
2. It copies the repo into that environment
3. Sets up Hugo based on version, using peaceiris’ script
4. Runs the Hugo build command (with drafts in this case)
5. Copies the newly generated public folder, makes a tar file
6. Copies the file over to the server, untars, and then removes the tar

All in all this is a pretty good way to deploy to a VPS or baremetal. Is it a little over the top? Maybe, but I’m a little lazy and that leads to figuring how to automate. So here we are.