Website Deployment with Git and Hugo

Deploying a website with Git and Hugo (or any other static website generator for that matter) is easy. I use a combination of Git and server-side website generation for jofu.org. This has the advantage that all my files are under version control and when I am ready to deploy some changes on my website, the process is as simple as committing changes to my local repository and pushing them to my deploy target.

  1. In case your website is not yet under version control:

    cd ./website
    git init
    echo "public" >> .gitignore
    git add --all
    git commit -m "adding website to git"
    
  2. Make a clone:

    git clone --bare website/
    

    Upload it to your server:

    scp -r website.git git@server.com:
    
  3. And add the just uploaded clone as remote:

    cd website/
    git remote add deploy git@server.com:website.git
    git push --set-upstream deploy master
    
  4. Set-up a post-receive hook

    On your server in the website.git folder:

    vi hooks/post-receive
    

    and add:

    git clone --recursive /home/git/website.git /home/git/tmp/website
    /usr/local/bin/hugo -s /home/git/tmp/website -d /usr/share/nginx/website -b "http://www.website.com"
    rm -Rf /home/git/tmp/website
    exit
    

    Assuming the Hugo binary is installed in /usr/local/bin/ Folders need to be changed based on your setup. --recursive is needed in case your theme is a submodule of your repository.

    Save and make executable.

    chmod 755 post-receive
    
  5. Test your deployment setup

    On your local git repo:

    git add --all
    git commit -m "some changes"
    git push deploy master
    

    You should see something like that:

    remote: Cloning into /home/git/tmp/jofu.org...
    remote: done.
    remote: Submodule 'themes/clean-site' (https://github.com/jf87/clean-site.git) registered for path 'themes/clean-site'
    remote: Cloning into themes/clean-site...
    remote: Submodule path 'themes/clean-site': checked out 'e9defa633ea12c0de10dfb6bbd1ec008120ccfa8'
    remote: 0 draft content
    remote: 0 future content
    remote: 3 pages created
    remote: 2 paginator pages created
    remote: 0 tags created
    remote: 0 categories created
    remote: in 40 ms
    
Avatar
Jonathan Fürst
Computer Science Researcher

I am a Computer Science researcher at NEC Labs Europe.