Hugo on Cloudflare Pages
Table of Contents
Cloudflare Pages?? #
Cloudflare Pages are static site hosts similar to the various Git* static pages such as Gitlab Pages or Github Pages. Previously this site was deployed using the AWS CLI and a classic S3 + Cloudfront build-out. While this was intriguing it was very much overkill for a blog like this and required too much devops toil for my taste.
This post is not an endorsement nor sponsored ad for Cloudflare
Deploying Hugo to Gitlab Pages #
The Cloudflare docs on deploying to Hugo are pretty straightforward:
https://developers.cloudflare.com/pages/framework-guides/deploy-a-hugo-site
the one thing i’ll call out is that while the build log within Cloudflare PAges says the site built - if you’re presented with a blank page check that the HUGO_VERSION is configured in your CI/CD variables².
You can find that with:
hugo version
hugo v0.83.0-DEV linux/amd64 BuildDate=unknown
such that BOTH Production and Preview have:
HUGO_VERSION 0.83.0
Once that’s all setup yu should have all the benefits of Pages:
- Analytics (still running Google Analytics along side for comparison)
- SSL/TLS (let’s encrypt ftw)
- HTTP -> HTTPS promotion
- DNSSEC
- GitOps
- Preview Environments
Could all of these features be done with readily available tools? Sure - HAProxy + Let’s Encrypt solves many of these but its nice for someone else to do it for a change 💅.
Its been quite an enjoyable dev UX and I’ll be using Cloudflare Pages going forward for other projects.