Post on Hugo and gitreceive.

Deploying a Hugo blog with gitreceive

=====================================

:date: 2021-05-10

:summary: How to deploy a blog built with Hugo using gitreceive

This blog post is actually one I meant to write a long time ago, but always put

off. I'm going to describe how to use gitreceive to deploy a blog that's built

using Hugo. I find the Heroku-style of deploying using ``git push`` nice in

some cases and this is a nice example of using gitreceive as any. Obviously

other static blogging tools can be used.

First, setup the server

-----------------------

We need to create a user on the server, grant it access to deploy the blog and

add the SSH public keys.

.. code:: shell

    sudo useradd -m hugo

    sudo install -d -m 755 -o hugo -g hugo /var/www/html/blog

    sudo install -d -m 700 -o hugo -g hugo ~hugo/.ssh

    sudo install -m 600 -o hugo -g hugo /dev/null ~hugo/.ssh/authorized_keys

    echo 'command="GITUSER=hugo gitreceive run %s %s" ssh-ed25519 AAAAC3....' | sudo tee ~hugo/.ssh/authorized_keys

Now we'll install git, gitreceive and Hugo.

.. code:: shell

    sudo apt-get install -y git

    cd /usr/local/bin

    curl -L https://github.com/gohugoio/hugo/releases/download/v0.83.1/hugo_0.83.1_Linux-64bit.tar.gz | sudo tar -xz

    sudo curl -L https://raw.github.com/progrium/gitreceive/master/gitreceive -O gitreceive

    sudo chmod +x gitreceive

Create the receiver script with the following content at ``/home/hugo/receiver``

and mark it as executable:

.. code:: shell

    #!/bin/sh

    set -eu

    repo="$1"

    mkdir -p "/var/tmp/gitreceive/$repo"

    echo '----> Unpacking'

    tar -x

    echo '----> Building blog'

    hugo --cleanDestinationDir

    echo '----> Deploying blog'

    rm -rf /var/www/html/blog/*

    cp -r public/* /var/www/html/blog/

    echo '----> Done'

Second, the client side

-----------------------

Actually, this is quite simple, just adding a git remote.

.. code:: shell

    git remote add deploy hugo@example.com:blog

And now let's give it a test.

.. code:: shell

    $ git push deploy

    Counting objects: 39, done.

    Delta compression using up to 8 threads.

    Compressing objects: 100% (31/31), done.

    Writing objects: 100% (39/39), 6.55 KiB | 2.18 MiB/s, done.

    Total 39 (delta 9), reused 0 (delta 0)

    ----> Unpacking

    ----> Building blog

    Start building sites …

                       | EN

    -------------------+-----

      Pages            |  3

      Paginator pages  |  0

      Non-page files   |  0

      Static files     |  1

      Processed images |  0

      Aliases          |  0

      Sitemaps         |  1

      Cleaned          |  0

    Total in 10 ms

    ----> Deploying blog

    ----> Done

    To blog:blog

     * [new branch]      master -> master

That's it, the blog is deployed. Obviously having the output from the script is

useful. We can change the ``receiver`` script to do a lot of other things.

Running ``docker-compose build && docker-compose pull && docker-compose up -d``

can produce a simple and straightforward dev environment.  We can make it more

general by running a script inside the repo and build a makeshift CI tool.

Lastly, I have an Ansible role to do all of the server configuration for you in

`my GitLab instance <https://git.shore.co.il/ansible/gitreceive>`_.