End of last year I started working on my private portfolio website and started to research how to easily build and deploy such static websites.
The Tools
Hugo
I discovered Hugo which is a very popular open-source static site generator. It is amazingly fast, very flexible and it makes fun to build websites with this generator.
Just follow the official "Quick Start" and you are running a beautiful static website locally on your machine in less than five minutes.
There are many themes available which are often highly customizable.
The basic workflow looks this way:
- Serve your website locally using
hugo serve - If you are done you generate the static website content running
hugo - Publish the generated website content (see next chapter)
Netlify
Netlify provides a platform to automate code to create high-performant sites and web-apps. Basically you just have to push your code and Netlify takes care of the rest.
Setting up Netlify is quite easy if your code is already on GitHub, GitLab or Bitbucket. You just need to select your Git provider, define which build commands should be executed and in which folder the final content is located.
For more details check the official "Getting Started" guide.
Netlify provides a free subscription model which I am currently using. Additionally there are many additionals features which you have to pay. Check the official Pricing page for more details.
My Setup
I started using a simple static website which I hosted manually on a webserver without using a service like Netlify. The custom domain I used is www.mokkapps.de.
Some month ago I decided to start my own tech blog about software development topics and I wanted to continue using Hugo. Therefore I had to choose another Hugo theme as the current theme was not capable of content management which is necessary for a blog.
After a short research I found KISS which had the style and the functionality I was looking for. Blog posts are written in Markdown which I really like for writing articles and other text-based stuff.
I wanted the blog to be accessible via www.mokkapps.de/blog so I had to generate the blog page using Hugo and drop it on the webserver in a blog folder. This was a manual process which I wanted to automate.
Luckily, platforms like Netlify can help at automating such tasks. I have integrated both websites in Netlify but still had to made the connection from one Hugo website to another.
Netlify provides Redirects for such cases. So I added a static _redirects file to my main page and now it correctly links to the second page hosted on Netlify:
/blog/* https://mokkapps-blog.netlify.com/:splat 200
Now all I have to do this is write my blog posts or make any other changes on my websites and push them to my Git provider. Netlify then automatically builds and deploy the pages.
Conclusion
It makes really fun to build and deploy websites using services like Hugo and Netlify. I can highly recommend to take a look at them, maybe you can need them for your current or future projects.
Top comments (2)
Hi, why you changed from Hugo to Gastby? Thanks
Because of the React ecosystem to be able to reuse existing components and learn React ;-)