searchmysite.net blog

searchmysite.net now has its own blog

Welcome

Welcome to the first post on searchmysite.net’s new blog. Well the first one first posted on this blog - there are actually some earlier posts which I’ve copied over from my personal site where they were first published:

I decided to split the blogs out because there’s quite a bit I want to write on both, and searchmysite.net does seem to be starting to get a life of its own now.

Building this blog with Hugo and GitLab pages

I decided to use Hugo and GitLab pages because that’s what I used for my personal site (see building a website with Hugo and GitLab Pages) and wanted to get it up and running in the shortest time, plus it works pretty well. I’ve jotted down the main steps below for reference.

Creating the project in GitLab

First step was to create a new project in GitLab - in this case at https://gitlab.com/michael-lewis/blog.searchmysite.net.

Then clone locally with:

cd ~/projects
git clone [email protected]:michael-lewis/blog.searchmysite.net.git

Create a new hugo project at that location (--force is required because directory exists):

hugo new site --force blog.searchmysite.net

Add a theme (more on that below), edit the config.toml accordingly, create a sample post in content/posts (the posts directory will need to be created), and start the hugo web server to preview on http://localhost:1313/:

hugo server -D

Configuring continuous integration in GitLab

As per https://gohugo.io/hosting-and-deployment/hosting-on-gitlab/, create a .gitlab-ci.yml in the root of the project containing the following:

image: monachus/hugo

variables:
  GIT_SUBMODULE_STRATEGY: recursive

pages:
  script:
  - hugo
  artifacts:
    paths:
    - public
  only:
  - master

Although not strictly necessary, I also created a .gitignore file in the root of the project with the following:

/public
/resources
/server

Final step was to add, commit and push all of these changes to git:

git add .
git commit -m "Initial commit"
git push -u origin master

Once the pipeline had completed, the new site was visible at https://michael-lewis.gitlab.io/blog.searchmysite.net/.

Setting up DNS

As per https://about.gitlab.com/blog/2016/04/07/gitlab-pages-setup/#custom-domains I went to Settings / Pages / New Domain, and added blog.searchmysite.net. I kept the default force HTTPS and use LetsEncrypt certificates.

Finally, in my domain provider’s interface, I added an A record for blog.searchmysite.net to 35.185.44.232 (the GitLab Pages IP address), and added the validation code TXT record so GitLab knew I was the owner of the domain and could get the SSL cert on my behalf.

Creating a new Hugo theme

I did try a number of different Hugo themes. It was relatively straight forward to switch between them to try them out. Unfortunately none of the ones I tried quite fitted in with the ultra basic design of searchmysite.net, so ended up writing my own theme. I started out referring to the nicely detailed Let’s Create a New Hugo Theme, although then switched to the Hugo templates documentation when I started getting the hang of it.

Conclusion

Setup was quite straightforward, although helped by following notes I’d taken previously. I hadn’t developed a Hugo theme before though, and was quite pleasantly surprised at how much work Hugo did for you (or how little you actually had to do). I know what you see here is about as basic as it gets, but it is (currently) less than 150 lines of HTML in just 7 files, which is nice.

Anyway, now I’ve a dedicated blog for searchmysite.net, there are quite a few updates on progress that I’d like to make. Watch out for these in coming weeks. There’s an RSS feed if you like.