blog setup: chapter 1 Setup Steps

October 19, 2022

Build your own static blog from scratch using Hugo and NGINX. This comprehensive guide covers installation, Git configuration, NGINX setup, and generating static content—everything you need to launch your self-hosted blog on Linux.

Hugo Blog Setup Guide:

Follow this guide to learn how to setup a Hugo blog website.

It is intended to track notes and tips on how to re-build the infrastructure running this site.

Update repository index, then upgrade all packages:
```
sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade -y
```
Install Hugo using apt:
```
sudo apt install hugo
```
Use apt to install nginx
```
apt install nginx
```

Configure user’s name in git:

git config --global user.name "YOUR NAME"

Configure username in git:

git config --global user.email "YOUR_EMAIL_ADDRESS"

Copy the default NGINX config file into the sites-enabled folder under a custom name:
```
cp /etc/nginx/sites-available/default /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/SITENAME
```
Use hugo to create a new site:
```
hugo new testsite
```
This will create a number of folders, one of them is the output folder: ‘public’.
Edit the site config file for Nginx:
```
sudo nano /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/SITENAME
```
Look for the line that starts with ‘root’, chage it to the ‘public’ directory created by Hugo.
root /path/to/site/public/;
Save and close the file.
Finally, restart the nginx service to have the changes take effect
```
sudo systemctl restart nginx
```
Use the Hugo tool to generate the static content to be served:
```
hugo -D -v -b "https://www.domainname" --templateMetrics
```
A brief explanation of the command above:
- -D = Build Drafts, generates output for markdown files that are in draft status
- -v = verbose output, useful for debugging issues
- -b = base url, optional?
- --templateMetrics = gather and display metrics on static content generation
  A complete list of command line options can be found in the Hugo Commands Documentation

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