Hugo

If your site doesn’t support HTTPS, better hurry up. Google already uses HTTPS as a ranking factor, but from July 2018, Google Chrome will label non-HTTPS sites as not-secure. The following setup is so simple that there’s basically no excuse for your site to not be HTTPS compliant.

These instructions assume you’ve followed the mish-mash of a guide I posted for the starting setup.

First of all, head on over to letencrypt.org and find the certbot installation instructions relevant for your webhost. In my case, that’s nginx on Ubuntu 16.04.

What follows is something of a personal reminder of how I got this webserver set up, using nginx to serve a static website which is generated by Hugo using git-hooks to deploy with a simple git push. I had to read several different tutorials to figure it out; those that I can remember I have linked at relevant points.

A while later, I added HTTPS support using letsencrypt, but I’ll save that for another post since it required some more fiddling.

In case you haven’t noticed, this page is Powered By Hugo ©️. Hugo is a very nice static website engine, taking your neatly arranged directories full of Markdown files and converting it into a pretty website. I had tried to do something similar with Flask but the process of getting a kind of “dynamically-static” site running where I could just drop in new files was too much of a faff. Then a friend recommended Hugo which, after a couple of days of messing about, seems perfect for my use case. It’s taken me a little bit of time to get configured the way I want and to get nginx to play nicely with it. Along the way I’ve learnt a few lessons: