Hello, There!

You can find this blog at on my GitHub, the repo is here.

This blog was written with Hugo, a Go language static site generator.

You’re probably reading this blog at joshuaskootsky.com. I found an old Dreamhost account I had, and decided I would put my website development skills to work and spin up a blog.

There was some work put into getting this up on a standard box, and I’d like to share that with you.

If you take a look at my deploy script, you can see the following:

# Subtree method here: https://gohugo.io/hosting-and-deployment/hosting-on-github/
echo "Deleting old publication"
rm -rf public
mkdir public
git worktree prune
rm -rf .git/worktrees/public/

echo "Checking out prod branch into public for deployment..."
git worktree add -B prod public deploy/prod

echo "Building site with Hugo..."
hugo # if using a theme, replace with `hugo -t <YOURTHEME>`

# Commit changes.
msg="rebuilding site $(date)"
if [ -n "$*" ]; then
    msg="$*"
fi

echo "Updating prod branch with message {$msg}"
cd public && git add --all && git commit -m "$msg" && cd ..

printf "\033[0;32mDeploying updates...\033[0m\n"

# Push source and build repos.
git push -f deploy prod

What on earth is going on here?

I’ve got my remote box specified as a git remote tag, specifically the deploy target. For me, that’s pointed at joshuaskootsky.com.

Using Git Worktrees I can, on my main branch keep the public/ folder in my .gitignore file, but maintain a deperate prod branch that is rooted in the public/ folder and contains the static site elements that Hugo generates.

I can then use git to orchestrate the deployment of my blog to my actual website. The markdown, styles, and themes that I specify for Hugo to use are kept on the main branch, and can be viewed on GitHub - but the static site elements, which are generated programmatically by Hugo, are kept seperate on the prod worktree branch. That branch I can deploy to the root of my website on my server, and simply serve up the static assets that you are reading now. Pretty cool and JAM stacky!

12 Factor Design and the JAM stack

Hugo follows the 12 Factor app principles. You can see similar language with people talking about the JAM stack, and Hugo definitely falls into JAM stack territory.

The Twelve Factor App design principles can be found at 12factor.net. It’s really interesting to see how well they aged.

To quote the author, Adam Wiggins:

I’m the author of 12factor (although really it is an aggregation of the work and insights from many people at Heroku). It continues to surprise and please me that this piece continues to be relevant eight years later—a virtual eternity in software/internet time. Fun fact: I debated whether to call it “the Heroku way” or somesuch. Glad I went with a standalone name, feel like that allowed it to take on a life beyond that product. For example I doubt Google would have wanted a page about “Heroku Way app development on GCP” in their documentation. :-)

Final notes

This work is being done on the main branch. Starting October 2020, GitHub by default will start new repositories off in the main branch. It’s pretty simple to switch from master to main, just run git checkout -b main if you’re on a branch of any name and want the content of that branch to become your new main branch.

But, the best guide on setting up git and GitHub to use main instead of master that I’ve seen is this blog post written by Scott Hanselman that I saw on Twitter here. That covers a whole lot more use cases.

If GitHub’s defaults are changing, that alone is a good reason to change your settings around. I’ll also note that when learning git, many people memorize incantations, such as git push origin master, and switching from master to main can help push understanding.

I love git. I’m always learning more about it. Incredibly deep, incredibly useful if you know only about 10 commands. Not sure if there’s a better guide for bootstrapping understanding and usage of git than git - the simple guide - no deep shit!.