The making of this portfolio site & continuous deployment with Netflify

Welcome to my portfolio site. I decided to jump on the JAM stack train for this one and go with Hugo as my static site generator. There are loads of nice templates available, and making a template look and feel like your own is a straightforward process, with 90% of the work achieved by editing the theme’s config.toml file. Hugo templates also ship with an example site with demo content. This makes it really easy to figure out the nuts and bolts of the operation, like appropriate folder structure, where to place media and how to link to them, how to configure menus etc.

Hugo’s command line tool is great too, which makes it easy to create new pages or posts, then spin them up on a localhost to check how things are looking. When you’re happy, the simple command of hugo builds the site in an impressively quick time, and populates a public folder.

Without too much effort I had what I considered to be a nice, basic site running locally. Up it went to GitHub. I’ve previously used Jekyll with GitHub pages, and I loved the simplicity of making a gh-pages branch to bring a site to life. However, this time I wanted to checkout Netflify for deployment duties. Netlify’s hand-holding is great, and so in just a couple of clicks I had my site deployed successfully on a random URL they assign. The only slight hiccup I had was adding a custom domain from Namecheap, but a quick Google took me to a blog which explained the process, and that was enough to get me across the line. The best bit is that Netflify works seamlessly with Github to create a continuous deployment pipeline, so as soon as I push changes from my local machine to Github, Netlify takes these changes and rebuilds the site.

So, as you can tell, I’m very impressed by Hugo and Netfily. It certainly feels like a step forward from the days of using Jekyll and GitHub pages.