Hugo rsync deployment

Why would you use a CMS if you have GitHub Actions, Hugo and rsync?

This action checks out your repository, generates a static website using Hugo and deploys the public files using rsync.

Requirements

Before we can deploy from github, we need to setup some things.
Assuming we want the user to be named github and the host static-website.com:

1. We need SSH access from GitHub to the webserver and the public key uploaded to /home/github/.ssh/authorized_keys.
2. We need a new GitHub repository with the name static-website.com (can be private).
3. We need to place the private key in a secret named VPS_DEPLOY_KEY (Repository -> Settings -> Secrets).

Example

The fastest way to start a project, is to simply clone the boilerplate.

But we can also place our Hugo website in the src/ directory and create a file in .github/workflows/deploy.yml with the content:

name: 'Generate and deploy'

on:
  push:
    branches: [ master ]
  pull_request:
    branches: [ master ]

jobs:
  deploy-website:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - name: Do a git checkout including submodules
        uses: actions/checkout@master
        with:
          submodules: true

      - name: Generate and deploy website
        uses: ronvanderheijden/hugo-rsync-deployment@master
        env:
          VPS_DEPLOY_KEY: ${{ secrets.VPS_DEPLOY_KEY }}
          VPS_DEPLOY_USER: github
          VPS_DEPLOY_HOST: static-website.com
          VPS_DEPLOY_DEST: /var/www/static-website.com/
        with:
          hugo-arguments: '--minify'
          rsync-arguments: '--archive --compress --xattrs --delete'

Hugo

Some Hugo commands that can help:

hugo version         # to compare the local version with the action
hugo server -s src   # to run the website locally
hugo -s src          # to generate the static website
hugo -s src --minify # to minify CSS, JS, JSON, HTML, SVG and XML resources

rsync

Some tips to test rsync:

--archive, -a     # archive mode (recursive, links, permissions, modification times, group, owner, special files)
--compress, -z    # compress file data during the transfer
--xattrs, -X      # preserve extended attributes
--delete          # delete extraneous files from dest dirs
--dry-run         # perform a trial run with no changes made
--exclude=PATTERN # exclude files matching PATTERN
--quiet, -q       # suppress non-error messages

Support

Found a bug? Got a feature request? Create an issue.

License

Hugo rsync deployment is open source and licensed under the MIT licence.