Hugo on Kubernetes & NGINX

i decided to make a website. a static one. this one. with Hugo. this is basically as a vanity project so i have some stuff to host in a Kubernetes cluster i’m running. the k8s cluster is also as a vanity project.

because i don’t like software, i wanted a way to deploy my site that doesn’t involve much. this post is about that.

Getting Started

i built my site by following the straight-forward Getting Started guide in the Hugo documentation.

i did hugo new site estradiol.cloud. and then cd estradiol.cloud; git init. and then i picked a ridiculous theme “inspired by terminal ricing aesthetics”, installing it like git submodule add https://github.com/joeroe/risotto.git themes/risotto; echo "theme = 'risotto'" >> hugo.toml. i appreciate the culinary naming choice.

at this point, my website is basically finished (i also changed the title in hugo.toml). i probably won’t be putting much on it, so there’s no point fussing with other details.

about deployment, the guide’s Basic Usage page has this to offer:

Most of our users deploy their sites using a CI/CD workflow, where a push1 to their GitHub or GitLab repository triggers a build and deployment. Popular providers include AWS Amplify, CloudCannon, Cloudflare Pages, GitHub Pages, GitLab Pages, and Netlify.

  1. The Git repository contains the entire project directory, typically excluding the public directory because the site is built after the push.

importantly, you can’t make a post about depoying this way. everyone deploys this way.

it also involves some system somewhere that can run Hugo to build the site, and push it to some remote system where my cluster can reach it. i definitely already need Hugo installed on my workstation if i’m going to post anything here (unlikely), so now i’m running Hugo in two places. there’s definitely going to be other complex nonsense like webhooks involved.

and hang on. let’s look at this again:

  1. The Git repository contains the entire project directory, typically excluding the public directory because the site is built after the push.

you’re telling me i’m going to build a nice static site and not check the actual content into version control? couldn’t be me.

Getting Static

what if instead i pushed my site to a git repository exactly as i intend to serve it? then i could shell into my webserver, pull the site, and nifty-galifty! isn’t this the way it has always been done?

one problem is that i don’t have a webserver, i have a container orchestration system. there are several upsides to this (few of which are relevant for my project) but it demands i get a bit more clever. i could run a little pipeline that builds a container wrapping my static site, pushes it to a registry somewhere so my deployments can pull it, all ready to go. but now i’ve got software again; build stages and webhooks and i’m hosting and versioning container images. i don’t want any of this.

apiVersion: apps/v1
kind: Deployment
metadata:
  labels:
    app.kubernetes.io/instance: estradiol-cloud
    app.kubernetes.io/name: nginx
  name: web-nginx
  namespace: estradiol-cloud
spec:
  replicas: 1
  selector:
    matchLabels:
      app.kubernetes.io/instance: estradiol-cloud
      app.kubernetes.io/name: nginx
  template:
    metadata:
      labels:
        app.kubernetes.io/instance: estradiol-cloud
        app.kubernetes.io/name: nginx
    spec:
      containers:
      - name: git-repo-syncer
        image: docker.io/bitnami/git:2.43.2-debian-12-r2
        imagePullPolicy: IfNotPresent
        command:
        - /bin/bash
        - -ec
        - |
          while true; do
              cd /app && git -c safe.directory=/app pull origin trunk
              sleep 60
          done          
        volumeMounts:
        - mountPath: /app
          name: staticsite
      - name: nginx
        image: docker.io/bitnami/nginx:1.25.4-debian-12-r2
        imagePullPolicy: IfNotPresent
        env:
        - name: NGINX_HTTP_PORT_NUMBER
          value: "8080"
        livenessProbe:
          tcpSocket:
            port: http
        readinessProbe:
          tcpSocket:
            port: http
        ports:
        - containerPort: 8080
          name: http
          protocol: TCP
        volumeMounts:
        - mountPath: /opt/bitnami/nginx/conf/server_blocks
          name: nginx-server-block
        - mountPath: /app
          name: staticsite
      initContainers:
      - name: git-clone-repository
        image: docker.io/bitnami/git:2.43.2-debian-12-r2
        imagePullPolicy: IfNotPresent
        command:
        - /bin/bash
        - -ec
        - |
          [[ -f "/opt/bitnami/scripts/git/entrypoint.sh" ]] && source "/opt/bitnami/scripts/git/entrypoint.sh"
          git clone https://code.estradiol.cloud/tamsin/estradiol.cloud.git --no-checkout --branch trunk /tmp/app
          [[ "$?" -eq 0 ]] && cd /tmp/app && git sparse-checkout init --cone && git sparse-checkout set public && git checkout && shopt -s dotglob && rm -rf /app/* && mv /tmp/app/* /app/          
        volumeMounts:
        - mountPath: /app
          name: staticsite
      restartPolicy: Always
      terminationGracePeriodSeconds: 30
      volumes:
      - configMap:
          defaultMode: 420
          name: web-nginx-server-block
        name: nginx-server-block
      - emptyDir: {}
        name: staticsite

Getting Flux’d

apiVersion: source.toolkit.fluxcd.io/v1beta2
kind: HelmRepository
metadata:
  name: bitnami
  namespace: default
spec:
  url: https://charts.bitnami.com/bitnami

apiVersion: source.toolkit.fluxcd.io/v1beta2
kind: HelmRepository
metadata:
  name: bitnami
  namespace: default
spec:
  url: https://charts.bitnami.com/bitnami

2024-02-28