Forgejo

Today, I spent some time automating the deployment of this blog. This site is generated using a static site generator called Hugo. While I love Hugo, deployment is a bit different from other blogs than, for instance, WordPress. In WordPress, you write and can directly publish the site. Using Hugo, however, you write your posts and then the site is generated, much like a compiler that generates machine code from the website you’ve written. Until now, this was a very manual process. I had to write the blog post, test it locally, and copy the post manually to my hosting provider. It wasn’t that much work to be honest, but still it was a small hurdle when writing a post. It also prevented me from automating some things, for instance, automatically creating a post when a new version of an app was released. That changed today. I spent some time setting up a Forgejo runner Docker container on my home server that automatically builds the site when committed to the Git repository. When I deploy from the develop branch, the site is deployed locally to that server, so I can directly observe how the new post would look in production. When it’s then merged into the main branch, the site is deployed here on thinkpractice.nl. Hopefully, automating this process will make it easier for me to write and post. In any case, keep posted pun intended, because some nice updates are coming soon!