I’ve been meaning to start writing again for a while. This felt like the right time.
Before diving into actual content, I wanted to document the setup process, partly as a reference for myself, partly in case it’s useful to anyone else with similar thoughts.
I went with Hugo and the PaperMod theme: fast, simple, no database. I’ll walk through how I got a local site running, pushed it to GitLab Pages for free hosting, and then wired up a custom domain through Cloudflare.
After deciding to create another personal blog and choosing the technologies, the next step is to build the basic site. For this I’ve been using a Debian laptop for local Hugo development. Unfortunately, the Hugo version available through the Debain package manager was quite old, so I downloaded the latest release directly from GitHub instead. From a browser navigate to the Hugo releases page and download the latest .deb package. Then to install Hugo package, run the command (with the updated version number): ...
After setting up the Hugo site locally the next step is to push it up to GitLab for hosting. For this to work we will: Create a new project on GitLab.com Push the code up Setup a CI/CD pipeline to build the site and push it to pages Configure GitLab pages to be open for everyone to view
GitLab provides a stable platform for hosting the site, however, the domain name does not look profesional. Hosting on a personal domain name looks a lot better. The steps I have for this are: Purchasing a domain through Infomaniak Setting up a CloudFlare Proxy for the DNS name Configuring GitLab pages Update to the Hugo base URL config