How I deploy Hugo in a Heroku-like way

Note that I had a blog before but I want to start from scratch

When I was attempting to blog, I started with Jekyll/Octopress. Octopress is very beautiful. It has only one con - it is slow. I searched for an alternative. There came Hugo in my hands. It is written in Go, which is for me a great alternative because I like tools written in languages that compiles to binary.

Jekyll has an option to be deployed with GitHub pages, Heroku and so on. I dislike this idea. I prefer to host it on my own (it is more fun). Unfortunately, Hugo describes how to upload the site via S/FTP. I also dislike this idea. There must be a cool way to do it, instantly. Here comes git with a great solution.

The `post-receive` hook makes the magic happen. It is simply a hook that runs after receiving a revision. It isn't even so much work to do. It is working like deployment on heroku. I host an additional repository on my webserver just for deployment.

Firstly. I create a user just for deploys since I believe it is a good practice to be a user for responsibility

# useradd -g users -m [deployer]

Next, I have created a bare git repository and create a tmp folder.

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$ git init --bare /path/to/repository.git
$ mkdir /path/to/folder/tmp

Now I need to modify the deploy repository the post-receive hook. Hooks are located in `hooks` folder. Normally, there is for everything a sample file. In my case, I hadn't it. I had to create it. My post-receive looks like this:

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#!/bin/bash
GIT_REPO=/path/to/repository/blog.git
TMP_GIT_CLONE=/path/to/folder/tmp/blog
PUBLIC_WWW=/path/to/webroot

git clone --recursive $GIT_REPO $TMP_GIT_CLONE
hugo -t crisp -s $TMP_GIT_CLONE -d $PUBLIC_WWW
rm -Rf $TMP_GIT_CLONE
exit

Now locally, I have to add a remote in git project like:

git remote add deployment deployer@host:/path/to/repository.git

Since themes in Hugo are cloned from git. It is nice to add it as a submodule.

git submodule add [link-to-theme.git] themes/[theme-name]

If I don't add this line above - the theme won't be cloned by git.

Now I can write some posts. After writing. Just commit your changes and push it wherever you want. Afterward just push to your deployment remote with:

git push deployment master

You will see also output when something is wrong or is it good

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