Last Monday (22 October 2018) GitHub was going 💥, and scheduled content on Code with Hugo wasn’t going live.
For context, the blog’s setup is documented in “Switching the lights on: Hugo vs Hugo config files”.
tl;dr (as is relevant to this post)
- Cloudflare DNS + CDN + proxying + HTTPS
- GitHub Pages
- Hugo as a static site generator
- CircleCI to deploy the site daily + on push (🤷‍♀️wasn’t in the post but that’s how I do it)
Contents of this post:
- On hosting with a business which isn’t specialised in static hosting 🤔
- Speedy migration to Netlify ⏩
- Why use Cloudflare then?
- The path forward
On hosting with a business which isn’t specialised in static hosting 🤔
Back to the story: codewithhugo.com was not building or publishing on GitHub Page… which means my post “Simple but not too simple: how micro improves your Node applications”, scheduled for publication at 7AM UTC (I’ll write up how I do this one day subscribe to get it in your inbox)… Didn’t go live.
As it turns out, the GitHub team itself struggled to get a post out during this period: “We use GitHub Pages internally and all builds had been paused several hours earlier, so publishing this took additional effort.”
What’s worse, GitHub’s web-hooks and other core APIs were either unavailable or really flakey/disrupted. Which means that migrating to Netlify wasn’t as simple as usual: “deploy from git” wouldn’t work due to disruptions on GitHub’s end.
Speedy migration to Netlify ⏩
A great Netlify feature is “manual deploys”, where you just upload a zip and it deploys it as a static site. Thankfully the latest version on my GitHub Pages repository had the post I wanted (it just couldn’t deploy it).
Getting the site up on Netlify was simple enough:
- download the repository’s zip archive from GitHub (thankfully this wasn’t on fire 🚒 like the rest of GitHub)
- upload it to Netlify using the dashboard
At this point the site is live on a *.netlify.com domain.
Getting the codewithhugo.com domain pointing to Netlify:
- Update the
Arecords on Cloudflare’s DNS to Netlify’s load balancer104.198.14.52
What surprised me is how fast the update happened. A DNS update should take time to propagate. Except this wasn’t strictly a DNS update since I’m using Cloudflare’s proxied DNS. That means if you dig codewithhugo.com you get the following answer section:
;; ANSWER SECTION:
codewithhugo.com. 299 IN A 104.27.140.8
codewithhugo.com. 299 IN A 104.27.141.8
Suprise! 🎉 those records don’t point to Netlify (or GitHub Pages), they point to Cloudflare (see https://www.abuseipdb.com/whois/104.27.140.8 and https://www.abuseipdb.com/whois/104.27.141.8). Cloudflare then proxies to Netlify’s load balancer. Super 👏 neat 👏 .
Why use Cloudflare then?
Well since @github Pages stopped building with all the issues, thanks to @Netlify’s
zip uploadfunctionality and @Cloudflare’s proxied DNS service I’ve been able to get the blog post I scheduled for today live.👏👍
— Hugo Di Francesco (@hugo__df ) 22 October 2018
When I first published “Switching the lights on: Hugo vs Hugo config files”, one of the reactions I received was: “You don’t seem to explain any reason for using CloudFlare on top of GitHub pages. Care to elaborate?”.
To which I replied (see the comment here):
- HTTPS (pretty sure it didn’t use to be a thing with custom domains on GitHub pages)
- CDN
- DNS
Which even I didn’t find that compelling, now I guess I do have a compelling reason to use Cloudflare: you’re able to change hosting provider within minutes if you leverage Cloudflare’s proxied DNS + CDN service.
I think due to Cloudflare’s proxying and Netlify’s manual deploy saving my bacon in this instance (Monday is newsletter day and I wanted to get the micro post in there), it’s brought value enough to justify my stack choice.
The path forward
Since I host my static sites on Netlify now (see “Deployment options: Netlify + Dokku on DigitalOcean vs now.sh, GitHub Pages, Heroku and AWS”), I’ve decided that maybe sticking codewithhugo.com on there permanently is a good idea. Sorry GitHub Pages.
If you want to migrate a HTML @github Pages site to @Netlify here’s an example config (tl;dr: use Publish Directory “.”) pic.twitter.com/pDvlMXnCoc
— Hugo Di Francesco (@hugo__df ) 23 October 2018
Here’s an example config for deploying a site hosted on GitHub (that would work as a GitHub Pages site) to Netlify:
Pretty simple, publish the root directory using Publish Directory: . and don’t set a build command.
GitHub Pages is awesome, my demos are likely to still live there. Disruptions happen to everyone but as is clear in their post-mortem, GitHub isn’t a static hosting service 🙂. Netlify’s core business proposition is static site hosting and deployment, that’s why Code with Hugo is going to live there from now on 👍.
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