Free hosting for Hugo on frama.io

You’ve set up Hugo locally and you’re ready to deploy?

You can get free hosting for Hugo thanks to the french non-profit Framasoft + get a SSL certificate and a fancy domain name like https://You.frama.io. And that’s free!

Here is a short Howto:

Create an account on Framagit#

First, create an account on Framagit.org

Click on the link received by email and customize the interface of Framagit answering the following question (if you don’t know what to answer, just stick to the defaults):

Framagit, intro

Authorize the Gitlab Pages to build from your account:

Framagit, authorize Gitlab

Project initialization#

Create a new project:

project slug must be your-username.frama.io
Visibility Level must be set to ‘Public’ (otherwise only registered members of your project will see the website)
do not tick ‘Initialize repository with a README’ to avoid conflicts in Git

Take a moment to register a SSH key in order to use git push without filling a password.

Open the page ‘Project overview’, and copy the reference of your repository:

Framagit repository reference

Use this reference in Git to add your repository as remote:

git remote add origin git@framagit.org:<your-nickname>/<your-nickname>.frama.io.git

Setup Continuous Integration (CI)#

Last step, create a file called .gitlab-ci.yml at the root of your project and paste these lines inside:

image: monachus/hugo

variables:
  GIT_SUBMODULE_STRATEGY: recursive

pages:
  script:
  - hugo --enableGitInfo
  artifacts:
    paths:
    - public

You’re done!#

Once you’ve pushed your files, wait a few seconds and your brand new website will stand at https://You.frama.io. Congrats!

Troubleshooting#

It’s not working?#

You can:

get some informations about the building process in Framagit → CI/CD → Pipelines
get some insight on the forums of Framasoft
if it’s working offline but get buggy when published, check if your local version differs from the one on Frama.io. Then have a look to the release notes of Hugo and check if something critical changed between the version on Framagit and the one you use locally.

Framasoft is a non-profit which can only keep running thanks to our donations.

If you have the possibility, please consider making a donation

References#

Understanding Gitlab Pages https://about.gitlab.com/direction/release/pages
(fr) https://docs.framasoft.org/fr/gitlab/gitlab-pages.html
(fr) https://framablog.org/2017/03/20/les-gitlab-pages-debarquent-dans-framagit/