I migrated my Blog to Hugo • Java Bien!

For years, this blog has been served by Wordpress. Actually, the first post (in french) was about starting a Wordpress blog.

It served me well until it didn’t

For almost as many years, I’ve been wanting to migrate all the posts to some templating engine that would generate static pages. I thought it would be easier to write and also easier to host.

I’ve almost migrated to Jekyll when I wrote one post per day early 2014. What stopped me was not Jekyll but the burden of porting old html posts written with the Wordpress WYSIWYDon’tG editor.

To partially solve my problems, I installed the Jetpack plugin to blog in Markdown. That was much better. I also ran Wordpress inside Docker. That was much easier to operate.

Let’s try again but harder!

Fast-forward to last week. I took a deep breath and migrated all the posts to plain markdown, fixed the images and cross links, imported the comments to Disqus, started to learn Hugo (the easiest part) and chose a minimal theme.

Yeah! Migration done!

Where should I host it now?

I didn’t really care where the blog would be hosted. I cared about a few things though. It should:

be performant,
be deployed with a git push,
serve on https
and bonus points if the SSL certificates are auto-generated.

Turns out Google, my new employer, has a very good solution with Firebase Hosting.

Firebase Hosting is production-grade web content hosting for developers. With Hosting, you can quickly and easily deploy web apps and static content to a global content-delivery network (CDN) with a single command.

It serves the pages on https and offers auto-generation of SSL certificates via Let’s Encrypt. It allows me to define redirection rules to maintain some urls I had on my old blog.

Can I “push to deploy”?

The only thing it can’t do is deploy the generated site when I push the Hugo sources. To solve that, I wrote a simple CircleCI script that’s triggered each time I push an article to Github. It regenerates the full blog and pushes it to Firebase.

Yeah to push to deploy!

So, when are you going to migrate your blog?