Hugo + Dokku + Wercker = Goodness

Hugo

Hugo is a static site generator with many powerful features like archtypes, themes, customization, etc.

Combined with tools like bower and brunch it makes for a pretty powerful app that could be more than a blog.

The workflow is simple - build your assets with brunch, run the hugo generator. The end result is a complete static html site you can deploy.

Dokku has been great for running multiple small apps on a single digitalocean droplet. The best part is its heroku buildpack compatible, so anything you can run on heroku you can deploy to dokku and more.

Wercker

A continuous integration solution that is quite powerful and free. I’m slowly migrating all my travisci configurations.

With a single wercker.yml config file, each git commit one can combine the static site generation and the deploy to dokku. Beautiful!

Requirements

add the dokku git repo as a submodule called “public” which will contain the generated site
create some dokku git environment variables in wercker config
create an ssh key in the wercker config for the project
add the generated ssh key to the dokku acl list

The wercker.yml file:

box: digitallyseamless/nodejs-bower-grunt
build:
  steps:
    - wercker/[email protected]
    - plasticine/[email protected]
    - add-to-known-hosts:
        hostname: $GIT_DEPLOY_HOST
    - add-ssh-key:
        keyname: dokku
    - script:
        name: Initialize git submodules
        code: |
            git submodule update --init --recursive            
    - script:
        name: Build assets
        code: ./node_modules/.bin/brunch build
    - arjen/hugo-build:
        version: "0.15"
deploy:
  steps:
    - add-to-known-hosts:
        hostname: $GIT_DEPLOY_HOST
    - add-ssh-key:
        keyname: dokku
    - script:
        name: push to dokku
        code: |
          cd ./public
          git config user.email "$GIT_USER_EMAIL"
          git config user.name "$WERCKER_STARTED_BY"
          git config push.default simple
          git add -A .
          git commit -m "deploy from wercker"
          git push origin HEAD:master

Result?

Can simply create a post and commit it. Once pushed, it will be deployed live.

Improvements?

Create a test suite to run in wercker as well.
Devise a way to create a blog post on mobile