The website I had before, was already generated with hugo. The theme I used was PaperMod. IT’s in my opinion one of the most complete hugo themes in view of the documentation and features. Despite these advantages I wanted a lighter and simpler theme. The site I had in mind was as close to html default style as possible.

Before starting to build my own hugo theme just for the fun of it I decided to look at the themes on the Hugo site: themes. This is where I found out about Bearblog and the fact that there are hugo themes based on it. I decided to use hugo-bearcub, a fork of hugo-bearblog. Bearcub has the killer feature of automatically generating an RSS feed.

hetzner server

Before hosting my blog on a Hetzner server I used Firebase. Using Github Actions I was able to make edits in the Github browser editor and the action built and published the new version directly to Firebase static page hosting. This setup was very comfortable but my view on Google and Firebase started to change. At some point it became clear to me I wanted to host my blog myself. The server is supposed to cost 3.23 Euros per month max.

Let’s Encrypt SSL Certificate

The simplicity of setting up an SSL certificate using Let’s Encrypt is astonishing. Certbot does all the work for you. Everything. Even the creation of the cron job for certificate renewal. I had to set up Certificates before, but my memories of it wer’e tedious and troublesome.

Publishing

Maybe it can’t even be called a pipeline, but it works. It’s just a bash script of three lines.

1hugo build
2echo "uploading to server"
3scp -r public/. user@leohofer.dev_host:/var/www/leohofer_dev_staging/.