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Sardorbek Imomaliev
Sardorbek Imomaliev

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The strongest principle of the blog's growth lies in the human choice to deploy it

#hugo #terraform #githubactions #githubpages

The strongest principle of growth lies in the human choice1

Build Hugo With GitHub Action

It is time to put our blog on the internet. Source code is stored on GitHub, so hosting it on the GitHub Pages seems like the easiest way to achieve that. A good starting point will be just using official Hugo docs.

We will need to configure our workflow to properly build TailwindCSS which is used in this project, and also I would like to use my own domain name instead of provided one.

Workflow from example

Documentation provides an example workflow file that uses GitHub Actions for Hugo action in the "Build Hugo With GitHub Action" section. It is ok to use it, but I will use combination of 2 examples (1, 2) from GitHub Actions for Hugo's README because it has one for projects using PostCSS.

name: GitHub Pages

on:
    push:
        branches:
            - main # Set a branch to deploy
    pull_request:

jobs:
    deploy:
        runs-on: ubuntu-20.04
        concurrency:
            group: ${{ github.workflow }}-${{ github.ref }}
        steps:
            - uses: actions/checkout@v3
              with:
                  submodules: true # Fetch Hugo themes (true OR recursive)
                  fetch-depth: 0 # Fetch all history for .GitInfo and .Lastmod

            - name: Setup Hugo
              uses: peaceiris/actions-hugo@v2
              with:
                  hugo-version: '0.91.2'
                  # extended: true

            - name: Setup Node
              uses: actions/setup-node@v3
              with:
                  node-version: '14'

            - name: Cache dependencies
              uses: actions/cache@v2
              with:
                  path: ~/.npm
                  key: ${{ runner.os }}-node-${{ hashFiles('**/package-lock.json') }}
                  restore-keys: |
                      ${{ runner.os }}-node-

            - run: npm ci

            - name: Build
              run: hugo --minify

            - name: Deploy
              uses: peaceiris/actions-gh-pages@v3
              if: ${{ github.ref == 'refs/heads/main' }}
              with:
                  github_token: ${{ secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN }}
                  publish_dir: ./public
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We will save it as .github/workflows/gh-pages.yaml. NOTE: I prefer using yaml extension instead of yml2

Updating workflow to make it work in our project

The workflow file I copied from GitHub Actions for Hugo action wouldn't work for our project structure. Additionally, I would like to make some improvements. Mainly

  • Add comments for the parts that are new to me or may be confusing in the future
  • Add links to documentation for used actions
  • Update and freeze actions' and packages' versions. I decided to use the same versions that I am using locally.
  • Add working-directory: ./blog option to jobs because actual blog source files not located in the root of the project, but in the blog/ directory.
  • Remove unused parts of the workflow

but some changes may not be so obvious, so let's discuss them

Using setup-node action's cache option

In the copied example, npm caching is done via actions/cache@v2 action. But we can simplify our workflow by dropping this step and using built-in functionality for caching

diff --git a/.github/workflows/gh-pages.yaml b/.github/workflows/gh-pages.yaml
index 401fd33..3ddf6dd 100644
--- a/.github/workflows/gh-pages.yaml
+++ b/.github/workflows/gh-pages.yaml
@@ -26,18 +26,17 @@ jobs:
                   hugo-version: '0.91.2'
                   # extended: true

+            # https://github.com/actions/setup-node
             - name: Setup Node
               uses: actions/setup-node@v3
               with:
-                  node-version: '14'
-
-            - name: Cache dependencies
-              uses: actions/cache@v2
-              with:
-                  path: ~/.npm
-                  key: ${{ runner.os }}-node-${{ hashFiles('**/package-lock.json') }}
-                  restore-keys: |
-                      ${{ runner.os }}-node-
+                  node-version: '18.7.0'
+                  cache: npm
+                  # The action defaults to search for the dependency file (package-lock.json,
+                  # npm-shrinkwrap.json or yarn.lock) in the repository root, and uses its
+                  # hash as a part of the cache key.
+                  # https://github.com/actions/setup-node/blob/main/docs/advanced-usage.md#caching-packages-data
+                  cache-dependency-path: ./blog/package-lock.json
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I thought that this change will be useful for all "Setup Hugo" users, so I've created PR with these changes to update action's example. PR was accepted right away.

setup hugo PR

so if you follow the same steps as I did, you will not have to do this manually 😎.

Building blog in node environment

For some reason, when the blog built normally via hugo --minify PostCSS does not pick up TailwindCSS's styles. I solve this by running hugo server and build from NPM's environment via custom npm run build script.

diff --git a/.github/workflows/gh-pages.yaml b/.github/workflows/gh-pages.yaml
index 401fd33..3ddf6dd 100644
--- a/.github/workflows/gh-pages.yaml
+++ b/.github/workflows/gh-pages.yaml
@@ -39,10 +39,13 @@ jobs:
                   restore-keys: |
                       ${{ runner.os }}-node-

-            - run: npm ci
+            - name: Install npm dependencies
+              working-directory: ./blog/
+              run: npm ci

             - name: Build
-              run: hugo --minify
+              working-directory: ./blog/
+              run: npm run build

             - name: Deploy
               uses: peaceiris/actions-gh-pages@v3
diff --git a/blog/package.json b/blog/package.json
index 4a4876d..49334d7 100644
--- a/blog/package.json
+++ b/blog/package.json
@@ -1,6 +1,7 @@
 {
   "scripts": {
-    "start": "hugo --source src server --baseURL http://localhost/"
+    "start": "hugo --source src server --baseURL http://localhost/",
+    "build": "hugo --source src --minify"
   },
   "devDependencies": {
     "@tailwindcss/typography": "^0.5.4",
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Use Ubuntu 22.04

You also may have noticed that we are using Ubuntu 22.04. On August 9, 2022 this version become generally available.

I started by using runs-on: ubuntu-22.04 in this workflow to check if everything works ok. It run without any issues. After that I created PRs to add support for ubuntu-22.04 and ubuntu-latest version to GitHub Actions for Hugo and GitHub Pages Action

Final diff of changes 

diff --git a/.github/workflows/gh-pages.yaml b/.github/workflows/gh-pages.yaml
index 401fd33..3ddf6dd 100644
--- a/.github/workflows/gh-pages.yaml
+++ b/.github/workflows/gh-pages.yaml
@@ -11,42 +11,48 @@ on:

 jobs:
     deploy:
-        runs-on: ubuntu-20.04
+        runs-on: ubuntu-22.04
+        # Ensure that only a single job or workflow
+        # https://docs.github.com/en/actions/using-jobs/using-concurrency
         concurrency:
+            # workflow - The name of the workflow.
+            # ref - The branch or tag ref that triggered the workflow run.
             group: ${{ github.workflow }}-${{ github.ref }}
         steps:
             - uses: actions/checkout@v3
               with:
-                  submodules: true # Fetch Hugo themes (true OR recursive)
                   fetch-depth: 0 # Fetch all history for .GitInfo and .Lastmod

+            # https://github.com/peaceiris/actions-hugo
             - name: Setup Hugo
               uses: peaceiris/actions-hugo@v2
               with:
-                  hugo-version: '0.91.2'
-                  # extended: true
+                  hugo-version: '0.101.0'

+            # https://github.com/actions/setup-node
             - name: Setup Node
               uses: actions/setup-node@v3
               with:
-                  node-version: '14'
-
-            - name: Cache dependencies
-              uses: actions/cache@v2
-              with:
-                  path: ~/.npm
-                  key: ${{ runner.os }}-node-${{ hashFiles('**/package-lock.json') }}
-                  restore-keys: |
-                      ${{ runner.os }}-node-
-
-            - run: npm ci
+                  node-version: '18.7.0'
+                  cache: npm
+                  # The action defaults to search for the dependency file (package-lock.json,
+                  # npm-shrinkwrap.json or yarn.lock) in the repository root, and uses its
+                  # hash as a part of the cache key.
+                  # https://github.com/actions/setup-node/blob/main/docs/advanced-usage.md#caching-packages-data
+                  cache-dependency-path: ./blog/package-lock.json
+
+            - name: Install npm dependencies
+              working-directory: ./blog/
+              run: npm ci

             - name: Build
-              run: hugo --minify
+              working-directory: ./blog/
+              run: npm run build

+            # https://github.com/peaceiris/actions-gh-pages
             - name: Deploy
               uses: peaceiris/actions-gh-pages@v3
               if: ${{ github.ref == 'refs/heads/main' }}
               with:
                   github_token: ${{ secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN }}
-                  publish_dir: ./public
+                  publish_dir: ./blog/src/public
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Deploy to GitHub Pages

The workflow we added will create gh-pages branch in our repo automatically after the first run. All that left to do is to update repository configuration to use this branch for GitHub Pages. By default, Pages should pick up and deploy files from the gh-pages branch, but due to GITHUB_TOKEN limitation we need to set Pages's branch manually. Read more in the GitHub Pages Action's docs.

I wanted to configure GitHub Pages using terraform because this project already uses it to configure this repository. But currently, due to how GitHub provider for terraform is written, configuring Pages requires some fiddling and will not work on the first run. During my research into how I could achieve declarative configuration for Pages, I found out that GitHub recently added actions that allow deploying to Pages without additional branch. I like this new approach better and in the future I will switch to it, but for now I decided to configure Pages manually as suggested by GitHub Pages Action that we are using.

Bugs

There are few bugs that I stumbled upon while applying these changes to my blog and writing about them

YAML multistring rendering

While I was re-reading this article to find issues in my spelling. I noticed something weird
chroma-bug
this is definitely a bug. I started looking into it. At first, I thought the issue is in Hugo itself, but after trying to make minimal reproducible example I was falling deeper and deeper in the rabbithole of dependencies. Turns out the issue was 4 layers deep.

Hugo -> goldmark -> goldmark-highlighting -> chroma

And there is already a bug report

key: |
    value
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I may have tried to fix it, but I think it may take way too much time because I do not have any experience with Go. So, I will leave this issue as is for now. Maybe in the future it will be a fun project to practice Go development.

baseURL causing images with leading / render incorrectly

I noticed that after deployment images were broken after further research it became clear that this happens because we are using baseURL with path - https://imomaliev.github.io/blog/. This is known behavior. It does look like a bug to me, but maintainers decided to close this issue as "wontfix" for now. In the future, I am planning to host this blog on my domain without additional path in baseURL, but for now I fixed it by using relative paths instead ones starting with leading /.

-![setup hugo PR](/building-the-blog-while-flying-it/07-the-strongest-principle-of-the-blogs-growth-lies-in-the-human-choice-to-deploy-it/setup-hugo-pr.png)
+![setup hugo PR](./setup-hugo-pr.png)
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So, another future exercise for myself will be to bring this issue to proper resolution in Hugo itself.

No custom domain for now

This article is already becoming pretty big, I think we will switch this blog to use custom domain in some other time. My plan is to do this via terraform as well, so stay tuned for this series.

Links

  1. Quote by George Eliot ↩

  2. Please use ".yaml" when possible. ↩

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