Blog moved to Hugo

Oliver Brown
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After spending most of its time on Wordpress (initially a self-hosted version and then Wordpress.com), the blog is now a static site generated with Hugo and running as an Azure Static Web App.

Ever since I created the Tic-tac-toe Collection site on Hugo I’ve wanted to move the blog, but I never had the time. The recent events related to COVID-19 have, however, given me random bits of free time, so here we are.

Tic-tac-toe Collection is being run as a static website on Azure Blob Storage, which is a way of connecting various bits of Azure together to host a static site. The new Azure Static Web App Service joins them all for you in a much more straightforward fashion.

Under ideal circumstances, the minimal steps to set up a static web app are:

  • Upload your site to Github.
  • Create a new Static Web App pointing at your Github.

And, if you’re lucky, that’s it. It generates a GitHub action for you that does the actual building, and it’s based on Microsoft Oryx. Oryx is a slightly magical, slightly scary tool designed to auto-detect and then build static web apps using a range of different technologies.

Unfortunately, for me, the auto generated Hugo script did not actually work. I ultimately used the GitHub action from here.