Using Hugo, Gitlab Pages, and Cloudflare to Create and Run a Free Static Website | Hacker News Reader

Using Hugo, Gitlab Pages, and Cloudflare to Create and Run a Free Static Website

tkainrad.dev

55 pointstkainrad28 comments

So far as I can see github pages supports ssl termination with let’s encrypt certificates all by itself:

https://github.blog/2018-05-01-github-pages-custom-domains-h...

Interesting, seems that this is indeed an advantage of GitHub Pages. With GitLab Pages, you have to setup Let's Encrypt certificates for custom domains manually.

Let's Encrypt for GitLab pages should be coming in the next release though (finally). It's been in the works forever.

Edit: source https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/28996

I have also chosen gitlab, hugo and netlify. Netlify because they have the nice feature to use forms in the site. My setup is described in this post. https://www.me2digital.com/blog/2017/09/move-from-wp-hugo-an...

Nice Work! I'd will check out GitLab pages soon!

I just wrote a guide on how to migrate from Jekyll-HPSTR to HPSTR-Hugo.

This in-detail guide should help anyone switch from Jekyll to Hugo or even Hugo to Jekyll.

I didn't notice this before posting:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20070203

Direct Link- Migrating from Jekyll-HPSTR to HPSTR-Hugo:

https://infominer.id/web-work/posts/migrate-jekyll-hpstr-hug...

What is a good way to get analytics and comments in such a set up ?

Not OP, but you can embed Google Analytics (or Tag Manager) into your Hugo template, and it's fairly straightforward to do.

Comments I'm not entirely sure of, because I never wanted them on my site in the first place!

For comments you can embed an external service, like Disqus.

Agree! And I'm sure it's also another script to add to the templates, at the footer of a post template, probably?

For comments, check out https://commento.io

Thanks for the input, I will do some reading regarding Disqus VS commento.

Another Disqus alternative you maybe haven't heard about? https://www.talkyard.io/blog-comments (this too with privacy, no ads etc. I'm developing it. Feedback & feature wishes = welcome)

Op here, I am using Disqus for comments. This is very easy to setup. My template even supports this out-of-the-box. Google Analytics is even easier - the only thing you have to do is set your analytics ID in your hugo site configuration.

I'm really interested to try staticman to run from a pi, but I found a bunch of different ways that I'll experiment with and have listed here.

That page is geared towards GitHub Pages\Jekyll, however a number of the solutions are SSG agnostic.

https://staticman.net/

https://github.com/aioobe/dead-simple-jekyll-comments

https://infominer.id/web-work/posts/github-pages-starter-pac...

Guess it's having connectivity issues?

Haven't read the post yet, but any advantages to using Gitlab Pages and Cloudflare with Hugo over using Netlify?

My personal blog[0] is Hugo + Netlify, and it's been a pretty great experience, so I'm always curious about alternatives! (I'm not a fan of the Netlify CMS though.)

[0] https://jonlim.ca/

the main advantage for me is that Cloudflare's free tier has no bandwidth limit. Netlify's free tier has a 100GB/month limit (https://www.netlify.com/blog/2019/02/26/netlify-and-bandwidt...). I put Cloudflare in front of my Netlify site because of that.

Ah, you know for some reason I was thinking Cloudflare was also doing some hosting, and now I realize I shouldn't make comments on things without having consumed a coffee to start the day.

I also have Cloudflare in front of my site, but that was there before I made the switch, and it's great!

What are your odds of hitting 100GB/month

Assuming you're just hosting your personal blog?

I used about 350GB in the last month according to Cloudflare (over about 3.5 million requests), probably because I serve a lot of 5-10MB PDFs. Being able to not worry about bandwidth fees for a medium sized personal site is really amazing.

Or instead spend some time to optimize your website a little (like not hosting yourself standard stuff like jquery, Bootstrap and such, compress images, etc). So you can serve 10s of 1000s visitors without hitting a 100 GB free tier ;-)

You're responding to someone running one of the more well-known developer blogs and hosting PDFs, it's not exactly surprising she might need a bit more bandwidth.

That does not follow, though. It's not like people are generally optimizing their bundle sizes when they are in services where that costs money like AWS or there's a quota like Netlify.

Not having a limit liberates you to deliver other types of content and you have something less to worry about. It does not imply not worrying about optimizing your users' experience

One advantage with GitLab Pages is that you don't even need any other service. You have everything in one (free) place (repository, CI/CD, static site hosting, ...). Cloudflare is already only for convenience. Page speed for a static site should be fine also without it. I use Cloudflare mainly for simplifying HTTPS setup and page forwarding rules.

I used to rely on Github + Cloudflare, but now services like netlify.com are a a simpler/better alternative.

EG netlify gives you a Docker based build environment + CDN, all you need is a a Github/lab repo with a config file.

Gitlab gives you a build environment with a choice of several static website builders. Personally I'm using Hexo rather than Hugo and it "just works".

How can you avoid content dupe for search engines?

What do you mean?

Gitlab (this is where you host the content) Gitlab Pages and Cloudflare are public-facing. If e.g. Google starts caching, for Gitlab Pages you might be able to set the canonical tag to point to the CloudFlare-served hostname, but I am not aware how to do it for the Gitlab UI.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com