Hugo VS Pelican

name: 🚀 Deploy to prod # Will trigger the workflow on each push to the main branch on: push: branches: - main # Allows you to run this workflow manually from the Actions tab workflow_dispatch: jobs: # The first job will build the hugo site and upload the artifact build: name: 🔧 Build Hugo site runs-on: ubuntu-latest env: HUGO_VERSION: 0.111.2 steps: - name: Install Hugo CLI run: | wget -O ${{ runner.temp }}/hugo.deb https://github.com/gohugoio/hugo/releases/download/v${HUGO_VERSION}/hugo_extended_${HUGO_VERSION}_linux-amd64.deb \ && sudo dpkg -i ${{ runner.temp }}/hugo.deb - name: Install Dart Sass Embedded run: sudo snap install dart-sass-embedded - name: Checkout uses: actions/[email protected] with: submodules: recursive fetch-depth: 0 - name: Install Node.js dependencies run: '[[ -f package-lock.json || -f npm-shrinkwrap.json ]] && npm ci || true' - name: Build with Hugo env: # For maximum backward compatibility with Hugo modules HUGO_ENVIRONMENT: production HUGO_ENV: production run: | hugo \ --gc \ --minify # We save the result as an artificat so we can use it in the next job - name: Upload artifact uses: actions/[email protected] with: name: release-artifact path: './public' # The second job will deploy the site to the FTP server using the artifact from the first job deploy: name: 🎉 Deploy runs-on: ubuntu-latest needs: build steps: - name: Checkout uses: actions/[email protected] # Download the artifact we just created - name: Download artifact uses: actions/[email protected] with: name: release-artifact path: './public' # This is the path where the artifact will be downloaded to - name: Deploy file uses: wlixcc/[email protected] with: server: ${{ vars.ftp_server }} username: ${{ vars.ftp_username }} ssh_private_key: ${{ secrets.ftp_password }} # or if you only use a password # sftp_only: true # password: ${{ secrets.ftp_password }} port: ${{ vars.ftp_port }} remote_path: '/var/www/app' # This will depend on your server local_path: './public/*' # This is the path where the artifact is located

Nowadays, it never has been easier to build and host a website for having any form of online presence. You don't even need a lot of web development knowledge. There are many tools and resources available that make the process easier than ever. One such tool is Hugo, a fast and flexible static site generator that allows users to create websites quickly and easily. In addition, deploying a Hugo site to a web server can be made even simpler through the use of Github Actions (assuming your code is hosted on github), a powerful automation tool that can be used to automatically deploy a website to a FTP server. In this article, we'll explore how to use Hugo to build a website and then deploy it to a FTP server using Github Actions, providing a step-by-step guide for those looking to get their website up and running quickly and efficiently.

The result of this historical evolution is that the world of static site generators has made amazing progress over the past few years and the Python ecosystem hasn't caught up with it. Nowadays there's a rich ecosystem of different options for static site generation, some of which lean more towards server side generation and simplicity (like Hugo) while others leverage Single Page Application frameworks like React.js or similar (like Docusaurus). On top of that, there are "headless CMSs" that can use some of these SSGs as a backend, offering a more sophisticated authoring experience while offloading the HTML output generation to a different component (like Decap CMS, Ghost, or Forestry).

We are going to use an application called Hugo to generate a static website. You could of course run Hugo on your own machine - but to flex your muscles in Azure, we're going to stand up a VM. You'll then be able to experiment with different ways to host this static website within Azure. First, create a resource group to house the authoring workload:

My blog is a static site hosted in AWS Amplify. There's no dynamic content on it at all. I push Markdown files to the main branch of my site repo in GitHub and Amplify builds it with Hugo. Hugo renders the Markdown as HTML and drops it in an S3 bucket behind a CloudFront distribution.

Hugo is not made for minimum viable blogs. Its advantage in performance only becomes important for bigger websites or blogs with thousands of articles. But especially for bigger websites it should be possible to auto-generate a good archive. However the developers of Hugo stubbornly refuse to fix this very important 8 year old issue: https://github.com/gohugoio/hugo/issues/448

If you don't feel like you need to create it from scratch (as in: if you want to have a static blog or website, and you don't mind if you didn't code every little aspect of it), I'd recommend using a generator like Jekyll, Gatsby or Hugo. And even if you don't directly use them, you can learn a bit on how they do this sort of implementation.

Hey thanks for looking :) hugo has a lot more moving parts, and a lot more dependencies [0]. bearclaw is written to be simple and easy to understand without instructions or learning any new paradigms about templating or frontmatter or other markup languages.

[0] https://github.com/gohugoio/hugo#dependencies

I had some expectations with lightweight alternatives to WP. Played some time ago with hugo (https://gohugo.io/), just wanted to set up a simple blog, couple of static pages, that i could extend any time I want.

I use Pelican (https://getpelican.com/) for my blog, which works decently for me. It is a static site generator written in Python.

But you probably won't learn much Python by using it (or Rust when using a generator written in it) since you probably won't need to change anything in it.

Surely a "local private wiki ... not web based ... on a desktop application" is not really a "wiki" at all, but rather a "static site generator" with a built-in "search". If that's what you want, there's a Python app called Pelican. Writing such an app from scratch isn't really a beginners project.

Pelican — best for Python developers

You can - you'd basically just create a python script that parses your HTML/CSS files and replaces strings with values from your YAML. However I wouldn't recommend that unless you're just using this as an opportunity to learn Python. If you want to standup a real site and you want to use python, I'd recommend a Python static site generator like Pelican or Nikola.

As you're familiar with Python, how about https://getpelican.com?

My own blog and portfolio site is hosted on github pages. Since I'm knowledgeable with web development, I use a static site generator, it's a software which generates your site pages for you on the fly based on pre-determined html/css structure and markdown posts. The setup exists in a single folder and all you have to do is push the generated html files to a github repo and the content becomes live on site! It's 100% static and hence 100% free, no PHP scripting or apache or whatsoever. Jekyll and Pelican are the most popular static site generators if you wish to go that route.

Pelican (anagram of the word calepin which means notebook in French) is what is called a Static Site Generator (SSG).

I know exactly what you mean by the part to have all the files locally and rsync them on the server. I use Pelican as a static site generator and my blog articles are markdown files in a git repository.

Markdown is a great format, and I used it for all my blog posts since I started writing. Pelican, which is the static site generator that I use, supports Markdown out of the box, so it was extremely easy to start using it, and overall I had an enjoyable experience.

https://getpelican.com/, can't get easier than that.