Introduction

At the end of the GitLab Pages Setup post, I described an issue I encountered with GitLab CI generating the static site. The issue is caused by Hexo themes being linked as Git submodules - which means the default theme configuration is used. At the time, I only had a single idea - but was not sure whether or not it would work. Since then I have had a few more ideas about possible solutions and this post will describe them.

Overwrite Default Theme Configuration

The most straightforward approach was to add the modified configuration file to the repository. Using the GitLab build configuration, the configuration file could be copied to the themes folder overwriting the default theme configuration.

The only benefit of this approach is its simplicity. Adding the file is trivial and the modified GitLab build configuration would look something like this:

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image: node:10.15.3

variables:
  GIT_SUBMODULE_STRATEGY: recursive

cache:
  paths:
    - node_modules/

before_script:
  - npm install hexo-cli -g
  - test -e package.json && npm install
  - mv themes/_config.yml themes/icarus/_config.yml
  - hexo generate

pages:
  script:
    - hexo generate
  artifacts:
    paths:
      - public
  only:
    - master

In case it isn’t clear because it’s only a line, the change is:

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- mv themes/_config.yml themes/icarus/_config.yml

This approach has a few problems though. The first inconvenience is if the theme allows the configuration of branding images or avatars that utilize a path in the theme structure these files must also be copied or moved into the theme after the submodule has been initialized. This could probably be overcome by mirroring the structure of the theme and modifying the command to move a folder into the theme during the build process. Changing themes requires updating the theme config file, the GitLab build configuration file, and adding the theme as a submodule reference. Most troubling however is that if the submodule is updated, there is no way to detect conflicts or updates that may break the theme except at runtime. Overall, this does not seem like a good approach anymore.

Include Theme Contents

The second option could be to include the theme contents directly instead of referencing them as a submodule. Doing so would eliminate the first two issues described with the previous method above. However, it still suffers from the final issue, although slightly different. Updates now are a completely manual process, which will likely entail overwriting the files - potentially leaving orphaned files. Additionally, it also adds bloat to the Hexo content repository which probably is not necessary. Overall, this solution is better than the previous one but still is less than ideal.

Fork and Update

The final idea I had is to fork the theme being used. Updates can be made to this new repository that is specific to the Hexo instance. Updates can be applied by merging the original master repository into this forked copy. If the update changes something unexpected, a conflict will occur that the user will have to resolve to finish the merge. The Hexo content repository would then have the Git submodule reference the forked copy. Another great part about this is that the submodule can be edited directly and changes committed for it from the parent module.

Summary

I think the final solution eliminates most of the major risks associated with the other options and is what I will be using. I can even make my forked repository private and have the GitLab runner still able to access it thanks to GitLab’s CI build permissions. The only differences are that my submodule name will need to be the project name and the URL will need to be changed from an absolute URL to a relative URL:

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[submodule "hexo-theme-icarus"]
  path = themes/icarus
  url=../hexo-theme-icarus.git

The other solutions should work fine but they seemed wrong for one reason or another. Choose whichever option has risks that you can live with.

Introduction

Depending on the referrer (Twitter), it may be easy to find out that I used to publish articles on BitBucket pages. I initially chose BitBucket pages because they were the only repository provider that supported free Private Repositories. However, I am looking at alternatives because BitBucket does not support domain forwarding (anymore) for BitBucket pages.

This is a problem because if BitBucket were to go out of business (which doesn’t seem likely but hypothetically) then all my links die with them. While I appreciate the ‘free’ server, I am also not keen on my URL structure being a sub-domain of theirs - it just seems unprofessional of me. This is why I never really considered options like WordPress.com or BlogSpot. There is nothing wrong with these companies or the services they provide. On the contrary, it is great that they provide these services because it opens up options for people to choose from.

My biggest issue though is if I were to switch service providers (which I am doing), I now have to either go edit all previously published links to use the new URL or abandon them. Either option is not a good option. This is what prompted me to look into service providers that support domain forwarding so that the platform I publish my articles to is irrelevant.

The two big contenders I know about are GitHub Pages and GitLab Pages.

Why GitLab?

I ended up settling on GitLab because I am more familiar with their organization setup and I wanted to get some exposure to their CI/CD pipeline. GitHub may be a viable option for CI/CD with the release of GitHub Actions but as of this time, it is still in beta. GitHub’s major appeal for me was how simple it seems to set up a custom domain and their documentation is superb. I had a few issues with GitLab, some of which seemed to stem from NameCheap, my domain registrar.

GitLab does have static site generator templates that can be forked as a starting point.

While you can create a project from scratch, let’s keep it simple and fork on of your favorite example projects to get a quick start. GitLab Pages works with any static site generator.

This is also visible when creating a new project:

My pain may have been less had I used one of these.

Setup

The first step is to create a new repository project on GitLab. This project should follow the naming convention of organization/user.gitlab.io As embarrassing as it is, I have to admit that this was my first mistake. I am not sure why, since BitBucket follows a similar naming convention but for whatever reason, I named the project jhache.me.

In case others make this same mistake, it is not the end of the world. Go into General Settings and rename the project.

This does not change the URL however, so it may be a good idea to update this before progressing as well. In the General Settings area expand the Advanced section and look for the Change Path section taking note of the warnings:

This should allow the project to be referenced directly with the GitLab URL (such as www.gitlab.com/jhache/jhache.gitlab.io). I am not sure if this is necessary though since I was troubleshooting 404 errors that may have been caused by the next step not being run.

With the repository created, the local Hexo folder should be committed and pushed. This differs from my previous workflow on BitBucket where I had a repository containing the Hexo folder and another repository containing only the site content that I would hexo deploy to. Since I want to leverage the GitLab CI/CD this is a necessary change.

CI/CD

GitLab CI/CD uses a YAML configuration file called .gitlab-ci.yml, much like Appveyor or TravisCI. The file tells the CI/CD pipeline how to build the repository. This file can be copied from the Hexo Pages Template:

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image: node:10.15.3

cache:
  paths:
    - node_modules/

before_script:
  - npm install hexo-cli -g
  - test -e package.json && npm install
  - hexo generate

pages:
  script:
    - hexo generate
  artifacts:
    paths:
      - public
  only:
    - master

Note: If this is a migration (as in my case) from another service provider, be sure to commit the contents of your local repository (if you want to save the history) before doing this or you will have conflicting heads that you will need to resolve somehow.

Since Hexo themes are added as Git submodules (if done according to the Hexo documentation), using one required a change to the configuration file to checkout the submodules. The final configuration file up to this point looks like this:

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image: node:10.15.3

variables:
  GIT_SUBMODULE_STRATEGY: recursive

cache:
  paths:
    - node_modules/

before_script:
  - npm install hexo-cli -g
  - test -e package.json && npm install
  - hexo generate

pages:
  script:
    - hexo generate
  artifacts:
    paths:
      - public
  only:
    - master

Committing this file should trigger a GitLab build. Once complete, the GitLab page should be able to be accessed from the name template described above (jhache.gitlab.io). If not, troubleshoot this issue before continuing.

Custom Domains

As explained above GitLab supports (multiple) custom domains to be routed to their pages. This is configured/set up in the Pages Settings of the GitLab repository.

Add a New Domain:

Once done, a screen will appear that must be taken to a Domain Registrar to configure the details of:

This must also be done for www domains since www is technically a subdomain.

I use NameCheap as my Domain Registrar so the remaining steps will use their Advanced DNS page for the domain. Other Domain Registrars may have a similar setup but I cannot guarantee this. GitLab does provide documentation from some Domain Registrars but NameCheap was not one of them. Fortunately, I was able to find one article that helped me configure my DNS Host Records:

The A record redirects jhache.me to GitLab pages. The first CNAME aliases jhache.gitlab.io as jhache.me. The second CNAME record aliases jhache.gitlab.io as www.jhache.me. The first TXT record is the verification code provided by the Pages Domain Details for jhache.me. The second TXT record is the verification code provided by the Pages Domain Details for www.jhache.me.

Since the Pages Domain Details contain the raw TXT record that should be used, the NameCheap user interface contains a substring of the value. The TXT records should be left so that certbot can verify ownership of the domain when certificates are regenerated - in case the domain name is transferred.

Once your domain has been verified, leave the verification record in place: your domain will be periodically reverified, and may be disabled if the record is removed.

• Verify the Domains Ownership

Depending on the TTL settings for the host record, this could take some time to propagate. You can use the dig command or Online dig to check the DNS records associated with a domain.

Back in the Pages Domain Details refresh the verification until it is green. Once verified, wait for a certificate to be generated - the Pages domain settings will look like this when it has been acquired:

Once acquired, the Force HTTPS setting can be set. With that requests to the configured domain should redirect to GitLab pages over HTTPS.

Outstanding Issues

Because GitLab CI/CD checks out themes as part of the build process, my theme configuration settings have been lost. I have an idea to resolve this by modifying the .gitlab-ci.yml to copy the desired _config.yml from a directory in the main repository, but I have not verified if this will work.

Introduction

For most small websites today, website speed and server security trump dynamic content. Once a small website has established a theme, it is unlikely to change. And even when dynamic content is needed; such as comments or contact forms, some services allow this dynamic content to be embedded using JavaScript. This is exactly why static site generators have become all the rage for personal and/or developer blogs. Enough where the number of options can be overwhelming, just take a look at the size of the scrollbar on StaticGen when no filters are applied.

Three Reasons Why I Chose NodeJS

WordPress has been the de-facto choice for years. They even know how much of the internet is built using WordPress. I used to use WordPress too, but only because I felt like I had no other choice. I was happy to finally have a way to get away from WordPress. Although their new Ghost blogging platform was a candidate I was considering it was eventually discarded due to some of the security concerns I had about it.

The first step to deciding which static site generator to use is to narrow it down by programming language. Conveniently, this is also a filter that StaticGen provides. The most popular ones that I had heard about were Jekyll (Ruby), Hugo (Go), Hexo (JavaScript), Pelican (Python), and DocPad (CoffeeScript). I could eliminate a few already based on my previous experience with the languages they used: namely Ruby and Go.

This left me with three potential language choices. Since I had some experience with Python from my college days I thought I would try something new. And it would probably be a good thing for me to try to get over my blatant hate for all things JavaScript. This led me to the decision that the blogging framework had to be built with NodeJS. Unfortunately, JavaScript has several different flavors and StaticGen does not allow you to select multiple languages at a time. At least not by default.

Getting A List of Frameworks

I dug through the source code for StaticGen and found that I could use Developer Tools to select multiple languages at once. The edit turns the option value from this:

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<option value=".lang-javascript">
  JavaScript
</option>

to this:

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<option value=".lang-javascript,.lang-coffeescript">
  JavaScript
</option>

A separate option could also have been added, but I only wanted JavaScript-based frameworks. The resulting list was still fairly large, but it was much better than before. To reduce the list further I made the rule that I would only consider projects that had more than 500 stars - which would allow me to test a few that were under DocPad. DocPad was the deciding factor because it was the lowest of the frameworks that I had heard about.

I had a pretty thorough plan that I was going to try each framework and rate it in its ease of installation, ease of use, theme support, and upgradeability. Honestly, there were still too many frameworks for this kind of analysis. However, I did go through them all and gave each framework an attempt to win me over. I may make a post with the results of this analysis.

Six Reasons Why I Chose Hexo

Hexo turned out to be the ideal blogging framework for me, and here are the reasons why:

1. Hexo Knows What It Is and What It Is Not

Hexo sells itself as:

A fast, simple, and powerful blog framework

Which is exactly what I was looking for. At this time, I only need a blogging platform for publishing blog posts. Should I ever need additional functionality, I may consider an alternate framework.

A lot of the other top frameworks on StaticGen are build tools that are better for sites that are not specifically designed to be blogging platforms. This is great for the amount of flexibility and control but is more than I am looking for at this time.

2. Hexo Keeps It Super Simple

Everything about Hexo was easy.

• [x] Installation
• [x] Setup
• [x] Installing Themes
• [x] Installing Plugins
• [x] Custom Theming

And the documentation is thorough enough that should any questions arise, the answer can likely be found in it. The only time I became lost was when I tried to go through the source code to understand how it was passing variables from the configuration files to the plugins while trying to set up another framework to do something similar.

3. Hexo Is Still Actively Maintained

Hexo is still being actively developed/maintained. Both in the forms of themes, and plugins; but also the core repository.

4. Extensible

Hexo comes with sane default values that will work out of the box, but these can also be changed using the plugin library. Alternatively, entire themes can be applied that have been built by other people if you do not want to do any of the work yourself.

5. Cross-Platform Support and Baked In Package Manager

Not specific to Hexo, but to NodeJS - but it still is a benefit to using Hexo as opposed to creating a custom static site generator. But even if Hexo does not have a plugin for a particular technology, a plugin can be created and added to npm.

6. Pluralsight Author Endorsed

By far the weakest reason on this list, but I still included it here because it provides more resources to learn about Hexo.

• Build a Better Blog with a Static Site Generator

In the video course the course author advocates for DocPad, but on Twitter, the course author has switched to Hexo.

Conclusion

Hexo might not be for everybody, but it met (and exceeded) the criteria that I was looking to fill at this time. Other frameworks would have been ideal in other situations - but for getting a blogging platform out quickly Hexo just made sense.