Apparently I didn’t take any notes when I originally converted my blog to hugo templating. This seems odd, so I probably just misplaced them. The blog content repo was created November 4th, 2018.

Setup steps

Initialize the submodule for your preferred theme.

Here’s a couple:

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git submodule add https://github.com/pravin/hugo-theme-prav themes/prav
git submodule add https://github.com/budparr/gohugo-theme-ananke.git themes/ananke

This will create a .gitmodules file at the root of your repo, and a linked project in the target directory. The target will appear as a link to the provided repo url when viewed through GitLab, etc..

During setup/update of the blog content, these commands will run to sync the theme files by referencing the content of .gitmodules:

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git submodule init
git submodule update

Configure hugo with config.toml

Here’s a sample config:

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languageCode = "en-us"
title = "Matthew Odle"
theme = "ananke"
pagination = "page"
[taxonomies]
  tag = "tags"
  category = "categories"
  • theme
    • points to the theme dir created by the submodule init above
  • languageCode and title
    • self-explanitory
  • pagination and taxonimies
    • control how page collections are generated; I just use basic tags in my content config

Writing a post

hugo settings blog

content

Upgrading the versions of things

update cascades ftl

Hugo theme updated, stopped working

Needed new version of Hugo, best way to get was snap

Apt version of ansible was too old to support snap

So had to update both

Now Hugo can’t find the site config file, thinks it’s running in some other directory

need

  • snap hugo in ansible play to get hugo 0.6+
  • pip install --user ansible to get newer ansible

short version is: submodules are the worst

i’m pinning them to older versions of the templates

the good news is i can reproduce the hugo config-not-found problem locally without any of the other pieces

something about how it looks for the config in the current directory, but it thinks it’s running from root, possibly because of how snap installs it

wouldn’t have any of these problems if repos were kept up to date, so apt actually gave you not-ancient stuff

this is also probably my fault

tbf, i’m on a pretty old release of mint and don’t do any repo management

but then again, i’m getting old versions with a brand new droplet

Update 2020-08-23

The solution to the hugo snap problem was to not use snap for hugo. Instead, I went with the tarball install approach, and this allowed for the latest version of hugo and resolved the config.toml not found problem.

Some warnings

When updating the submodule, it is best to clear the checkout dir completely from the droplet. It might make sense to build this step into the deploy play to ensure clean checkouts.