This is a quick post on the static site generator Hugo, which I’m now using to power hackerific.net, with a little bit tacked on the end about how quick and easy it was to start using Let’s Encrypt to get working SSL certificates for this site, for free!

These are both excellent projects, definitely work a look.

Hugo

I’ve been a fan of static site generators since I first read about Jekyll, but I was never completely happy with my setup. When I started using it things like tagging felt clunky and ill supported (basically, I had a Rakefile which parsed the YAML front matter and spat out an HTML page), and because I don’t want to faff about with custom Ruby installs keeping it working on both my MacBook Pro and Debian VPS felt like a lot of work.

So, like a good hacker I decided that instead of just fixing my existing (admittedly trivial) problems I’d give myself a load more and move the site to a different generator.

After reading about a few different generators, I settled on Hugo, a generator written in Go, with some interesting features, notably:

  • Super easy setup
  • Jekyll import
  • A cool live reloading preview mode

Installation was totally painless, on my Mac I used [Homebrew] to install the hugo formula, and on my debian server I didn’t install anything, since I’m just copying over the generated site using [rsync]. If I do want to run it there, there almost certainly won’t be a debian package, so I’ll have to build it from source, or grab a binary.

After the install, I moved onto site creation. To do this, I used the import tool you can find mentioned in the Hugo docs. This was largely painless, with the exception of a few odd posts where it choked on some broken Markdown, and where I had improperly formatted dates by omitting leading zeros in a few places. At this point I discovered Hugo’s most annoying trait, which is that its error messages can be a bit cryptic, but it’s nothing google can’t handle!

By this time, I had an almost working site, and it was time to start configuring and styling things.

Hugo has a great theme library, but I couldn’t find exactly what I wanted. In the end, I modified the Hyde Y theme, which is itself a fork of another theme, which is actually ported from Jekyll.

My tweaks returned some of the styling from the previous generation of my site, like the circuit board background, white, semi transparent backreound, and added another couple of extra Font Awesome icons to the top bar. Being lazy, I didn’t properly fork the theme’s repo, so you can find my modded version in with the rest of the site’s config and posts.

The result is as you see now. I’m pretty happy with it, and I think the extra features more than make up for the effort involved in setting it up If you’re making an effort to get back into blogging and feel like freshening up and existing site you should try Hugo, it’s pretty cool.

Let’s Encrypt

Let’s Encrypt was born from a desire to encrypt all traffic on the web, and to make it simple for non systems administrators to do it. I also think it was born from a desire to shake up and show up the CA industry, in order to force them to get their collective acts together, and so far I’d say they’re doing a good job!

I was planning to write an entire post on the issuance and setup process, but Let’s Encrypt has done such an excellent job with its tools that it’s too simple to be worthwhile.

I installed the client and within about 10 minutes I had a working SSL configuration which scores A+ on the industry standard SSL Labs test site. That’s pretty amazing!

The only functionality currently missing is code for automatic renewals, which are necessary because Let’s Encrypt certificates are only valid for 90 days. However, an example script is provided, and could easily be added to a cron job.

Overall, I’m really impressed with how slick this project is turning out, and I’m looking forward to seeing more of the web less open to attacks and surveillance, so I’d definitely encourage you to give it a go.