After restarting my blog, I wanted a way to automate my workflow. I currently work for AWS, and want to use the features of the cloud to manage and deploy my blog, but for as little cost as possible. The lowest cost for a static site like mine is Amazon S3, which offers to host the objects in the bucket as a static website.

This starts by adopting a solid framework for building static sites. After trying a few, I selected Hugo. I had been using mkdocs for training/tutorials but felt it lacked a good native layout engine and wasn’t a good fit for a blog.

I followed the installation instructions, but wanted something I could containerize (since it’s relevant to my current work). Thus, I created docker-hugo as a simple project to containerize hugo.

For now, this includes a README and a Dockerfile (copied as of August 3, 2018):

FROM centos:latest as builder

RUN yum -y update
RUN curl -sL -o hugo.tar.gz https://github.com/gohugoio/hugo/releases/download/v0.46/hugo_0.46_Linux-64bit.tar.gz && tar zxf hugo.tar.gz hugo

FROM scratch

COPY --from=builder /hugo .

VOLUME /host
WORKDIR /host
EXPOSE 1313

ENTRYPOINT ["/hugo"]

While a simple example, it does combine some newer Docker features. I used a multi-stage build to download the actual binary, then a scratch image for the actual deployment. The README highlights the syntax I use for the command, and an alias for being able to run hugo new posts/docker-hugo.md with all of my environment variables already plugged in. This can also be adapted for a future CI/CD process.