Hugo on Me, Myself, and Technology

Hosting your Hugo website for free on Cloudflare

Mon, 03 Oct 2022 11:05:00 +0200

You probably already know how big a fan I am of Cloudflare. So while looking around on the Cloudflare console, when I discovered Cloudflare pages, I was overjoyed! It took me only a couple of minutes to switch hosting this blog from DigitalOcean apps to Cloudflare pages. That’s the beauty of code driven deployments 🙂

I followed the very handy documentation here on the Cloudflare developer portal, and switching was a breeze! The only point to note is that by default Cloudflare uses an old version of Hugo, so your website may not compile. It’s a better idea to instead use the HUGO_VERSION environment variable and set it to the same version as what you’re using locally (you can get your local version by running hugo version).

Hosting your Hugo website for free

Thu, 29 Sep 2022 11:05:00 +0200

As promised, here I am with a blog post about how I shifted to Hugo from Wordpress. What we’ll achieve by the end of this blog post:

Migrating your data out of Wordpress (optional)
Installing Hugo
Creating a new blank Hugo website
Importing your wordpress content into your new Hugo site (optional)
Committing your new website to Github
Setting up a free account with DigitalOcean and linking your GitHub website repo to DigitalOcean apps to enable automated deployments
Setting up a custom domain for your website on DigitalOcean

Migrating your data out of Wordpress

I found the easiest way to do this is to use the WordPress Jekyll Exporter plugin. Just install this on your WordPress site, and download an export. Keep the zip file somewhere safe, we will need it later on.

Switched to Hugo

Wed, 21 Sep 2022 16:57:00 +0200

Static site generators have picked up a lot of steam in the past few years. This much neglected blog of mine was running WordPress up until now, and even though it was good enough for me (let’s face it, I wasn’t really doing much with my blog anyway), I wanted to play around with SSGs. The ultimate trigger for me was my host telling me that I’m running out on disk space, and needed to decide if I wanted to go to the next tier of hosting with them. I decided that I had had enough with WordPress, and started looking at alternate ways to host this blog. At first, I looked at Ghost, and even though it was very fancy and easy to use, it was overkill for me, and I really wanted to go database-less. Out of all the SSGs I looked at, I decided to use Hugo for the following reasons: