Github Actions for Hugo Page

2023-06-10 412 words 2 minutes

Contents

This short article provides how to deploy a Hugo site where the github actions come in handy. (It is not a tutorial to build a site with Hugo)

Before the technical part, I would like to demystify the motivation for building this site which, as depicted, should act like a chronicle of thoughts for reflecting, documenting and organizing sparks of inspiration over time. Additionally, it serves as a portfolio that exhibits a diverse range of work.

Now it’s time for github actions.

Theme

The selected theme runs as a submodule in the source repo so that Hugo is able to build the site from the container by solely copying the markdown files. git submodule add https://github.com/dillonzq/LoveIt.git themes/LoveIt

To remove a previously added submodule, this post can help.

Deployment

Note

There are two repos in my implementation: one is to store markdown and config files and the other is for publishing the static site. But you can definitely achieve this by one repo as described in Hugo Docs

Thanks to actions-hugo, we have a simple solution for deploying a Hugo site with github actions.

Generate deploy keys by ssh-keygen -t rsa -b 4096 -C “$(git config user.email)” -f deploy-key -N “"
With the key pair, we store private key and public key correspondingly in source repo (Actions secrets and variables) and page repo (Deploy keys).
Put workflow file in .github/workflows/ in source repo.

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name: Remote Deployment

on:
  push:
    branches:
    - master

jobs:
  build-deploy:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest

    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@master
      - name: Checkout submodules
        shell: bash
        run: |
          auth_header="$(git config --local --get http.https://github.com/.extraheader)"
          git submodule sync --recursive
          git -c "http.extraheader=$auth_header" -c protocol.version=2 submodule update --init --force --recursive --depth=1        
      
      - name: Setup Hugo
        uses: peaceiris/actions-hugo@v2
        with:
          hugo-version: 0.68.3
          extended: true
  
      - name: Build
        run: hugo --minify
  
      - name: Deploy
        uses: peaceiris/actions-gh-pages@v3
        with:
          deploy_key: ${{ secrets.DEPLOY_KEY }}
          external_repository: Ykaros/ykaros.github.io
          publish_branch: master  
          publish_dir: ./public

Submodule Update

Recent Update

I made some changes to the submodule recently but the they are not reflected when I push the changes to the submodule.

To make sure the latest commits submodule are tracked by the parent repository, simply push the latest submodule by

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git add themes/LoveIt
git commit -m "submodule sync"
git push origin

More information can be found at this post