hugo --> https://osgav.run

I stumbled across the Hugo static site generator recently and after reading a little and watching a short video (01:08) I thought it looked pretty interesting and worth trying out. It’s a fairly light blogging platform which can be used with GitHub Pages, which can then be topped with another service to provide SSL via a Let’s Encrypt certificate.

I’m still not 100% sure about the service hooking me up with the Let’s Encrypt SSL at the moment - we’ll see how it goes. Otherwise it looks like Hugo & GitHub Pages will provide a smooth experience for maintaining a blog of posts and pages.

The main steps I went through after clicking some link about hugo…

discovered Hugo
tested blog locally with hugo server
found really awesome responsive theme
wrote initial content
uploaded to GitHub Pages https://osgav.github.io
purchased domain osgav.run
configured osgav.github.io repo with CNAME file
registered for Kloudsec CDN service to provide Let’s Encrypt SSL
configured Kloudsec website to point at GitHub Pages site
configured NS records with domain provider (provider’s nameservers)
configured A records with domain provider (Kloudsec’s IPs)
updated Hugo site configuration to use https://osgav.run domain name

I didn’t necessarily perform these in that exact order towards the end (and I’m not entirely certain that would be an optimum order) so consequently I did have a little bit of downtime between switching my site from osgav.github.io to osgav.run but I believe it was due to the new DNS not being fully live yet - so not the kind of downtime Kloudsec’s documentation advises they mitigate against.

wrote initial content

…actually consisted of thoroughly digging through the project files and getting a grasp of its structure, setting up the menu and theming and looking at changes I’d like to make that aren’t so simple. While doing this I also started writing a few short scripts and created a cheatsheet to help make writing and publishing blog posts easier.

I still have plenty to learn about Hugo so I will no doubt revisit these in future, but I’ve written a bit about the build process (yet to automate publishing) and the cheatsheet I’ve started here:

Hugo Build and Publish Workflow (in progress)
Hugo Markdown Cheatsheet

GitHub has a lot of relevant help pages for setting up a GitHub Pages site and configuring a custom domain. I read through many of them, which I’ve listed below - if you’re thinking about setting up GitHub Pages with a custom domain and powering it with Hugo, hopefully some of the hints I’ve mentioned will be useful alongside the GitHub documentation and other material you read…

The extra layer - Kloudsec - providing the Let’s Encrypt SSL is necessary because GitHub Pages do not currently support SSL on custom domains.

You can have SSL on a *.github.io domain or plain HTTP on a custom domain.

While reading into this I gathered CloudFlare is a popular solution but people do have some concerns over certain configuration options - by using Kloudsec I am by no means using the most optimally configurable and secure solution but it is very easy to get SSL enabled for the visitor –> Kloudsec edge portion of the journey.

I haven’t dug particularly deep into this but it may be possible for CloudFlare to serve out a HTTPS custom domain from the edge and communicate with a HTTPS GitHub Pages origin (where you haven’t configured a custom domain so are still on HTTPS *.github.io) - so for those who want a particularly secure static blog that may be the thing to do…

Also while reading into all of this, I stumbled across a colleague’s personal blog that amusingly has the same theme (the original) for another blogging platform - Ghost. And is hosted in an entirely different way, but produces a very similar output :) https://iainjp.com/ - From Jekyll to Ghost