Using Netlify, Hugo and GitLab

2018-06-15 Netlify Hugo Gitlab

Now that the site is up I thought that I would quickly mention how this is built.

I have been really into static site generators for some time, mainly after having to administrate and maintain a large number of WordPress sites and clean them up after hacking attempts (protip: if you want to use WordPress - just pay for it at WordPress.com so that they keep it up to date).

I have used Pelican, Lektor, and a couple of other Python ones but a colleague at work mentioned Hugo and we wanted to try it out for a site at work.

The problem with all static site generators in most workflows is how do we publish it. I have also tried different things from custom nginx deploys to Amazon AWS S3 (with AWS CloudFront of course) and Google Cloud Storage with Google Cloud CDN.

But after hearing about good things about Netlify on Hacker News I decided that this is probably the no-hassle way of doing it in 2018.

I host the code and the site on Gitlab, with a new commit Netlify automatically picks up the changes, builds the site and publishes it.

Netlify

It was easy to change the DNS. Just pointing the records to Netlify’s CDN and the site was up and running, after this Netlify lets you get a certificate from LetsEncrypt.