Hugo website pipeline proposal

[drmowinckels]

Hugo is a static website generator. Its fast and realiable, and we can easily build it our selves, with no extra costs.

Website build proposal:

• use this repo for all content for the website
• build the website using github actions
• deploy to to the web using Netlify (we qualify for free team account there)

I've done this for my own webpage and also for R-Ladies

[kasbohm]

I like it, good plan.
Do you have a scaffold/boilerplate you would like to start from, or start from scratch?
Netflify free tier?

[drmowinckels]

Netlify free tier is more than enough, especially using the netlify cli in github actions, means netlify it self will not have much build time. And getting an open source team is mostly so that more than one user from us can access the Netlify account and administer from the Netlify side.

When it comes to hugo themes, I have in #1 listed some I think might be good starting points, that I can build from.

I am partial to any theme using bootstrap, as I have been thinking of making a lcbc custom bootstrap css we can use on various projects.

[drmowinckels]

example of github action for building the site:

https://github.com/Athanasiamo/DrMowinckels/runs/4421312140?check_suite_focus=true

this compiles my personal webpage. THere's lots we can do in terms of setting up scripts to update publications/citations etc.

Another example is the R-Ladies webaite, which also grabs other private repos before building
https://github.com/rladies/website/actions/runs/1547194312

[drmowinckels]

One thing that the Rladies website is a nice example of, is the parts where we also check for the json data validity before building the page. This is convenient as we'd likely use hugo data templates for things like projects and staff pages, and having an automatic check on whether the jsons are in valid format before building is really convenient.

For adding new jsons, we can also create magic links with github, that prepopulates a newly initiated file through github with content (like json), so that people will only need to alter the values in the json, not the keys or general json setup.

[drmowinckels]

made a boilerplate in the repo now, so you can have a peak at how it works.

[kasbohm]

Awesome, I see the advantages and flexibility of using GHA for pulling data etc.

• Have you looked at the possibility to use AWS lambda functions for fetching dynamic/changing data from APIs? Netflify has a functions wrapper for running lambdas. Maybe possible at deploy/build time, but probably better suited for runtime, i.e. Jamstack (https://www.netlify.com/products/functions/)
• Doing stuff at build time in netlify also seems possible, for example like https://freek.dev/1396-going-serverless-with-hugo-and-netlify
• Considered https://www.netlifycms.org/docs/hugo/?

Just exploring (too many) possibilities and solutions 🤪

[drmowinckels]

I have no experience or knowledge about these things, but I'm sure we can figure it out together when we get there :)