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estradiol.cloud/content/posts/hugo-on-k8s-nginx.md

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+++ title = 'Hugo on Kubernetes & NGINX' date = 2024-02-28T15:35:46-08:00 draft = true series = ['wtf'] categories = ['Tutorial'] tags = ['meta', 'k8s', 'flux', 'hugo'] toc = true +++

i decided to make a website. a static one. this one. with Hugo. the main reason i have for this is 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 of it. 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.1

at this point, my website is basically finished (i also changed the title in hugo.toml). i probably won't be putting anything on it, so there's no point fiddling 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 push{{< sup "1" >}} 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 deploying this way. everyone deploys this way. if i deploy this way, this site will have no content.

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 the compiled site. i definitely already need Hugo installed on my workstation if i'm going to post anything.2 so now i'm running Hugo in two places. there's surely going to be other complex nonsense like webhooks involved.

diagram: deploy w/ GitHub pages & actions

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

suppose i instead checked my content into git exactly as i intend to serve it? then i could shell into my server box, pull the site, and nifty-galifty! isn't this the way it has always been done?

my problem is that i don't have a server box. i have a container orchestration system. there are several upsides to this3 but it means that somehow my generated content needs to end up in a container. because Pods are ephemeral and i'd like to run my site with horizontal scalability4, i don't want my container to need to retain runtime state across restarts or replicas.

i could run a little pipeline that builds a container wrapping my content and pushes it to a registry somewhere my deployments can pull it. all ready to go. but now i've got software again: build stages and webhooks and, to make matters worse, now i'm hosting and versioning container images.

diagram: deploy w/ container build

i don't want any of this. i just want to put some HTML and static assets behind a web server.

instead, i'd like to deploy a popular container image from a public registry and deliver my content to it continuously.

a minimal setup to achieve this might look like:

  • a Pod with:
    • an nginx container to serve the content;
    • a git-pull sidecar that loops, pulling the git content;
    • an initContainer to do the initial checkout;
    • an emptyDir volume to share between the containers.
  • a ConfigMap to store the nginx config.

diagram: minimal pod/configmap setup

i use git sparse-checkout to avoid pulling repository contents i don't want to serve out:

# git-clone command
git clone https://code.estradiol.cloud/tamsin/estradiol.cloud.git --no-checkout --branch trunk /tmp/www;
cd /tmp/www;
git sparse-checkout init --cone;
git sparse-checkout set public;
git checkout;
shopt -s dotglob
mv /tmp/www/* /www

script up my git pull loop:

# git-pull command
while true; do
  cd /www && git -c safe.directory=/www pull origin trunk
  sleep 60
done

and configure nginx to use public/ as root:

# ConfigMap; data: default.conf
server {
  listen 80;
  location / {
    root   /www/public;
    index  index.html;
  }
}

the rest of this is pretty much boilerplate:

{{< code-details summary="kubectl apply -f estradiol-cloud.yaml" lang="yaml" details=`

estradiol-cloud.yaml

apiVersion: v1 kind: ConfigMap metadata: labels: app.kubernetes.io/instance: estradiol-cloud app.kubernetes.io/name: nginx name: nginx-server-block data: default.conf: |- server { listen 80; location / { root /www/public; index index.html; } }

apiVersion: v1 kind: Pod metadata: name: nginx labels: app.kubernetes.io/instance: estradiol-cloud app.kubernetes.io/name: nginx spec: containers:

  • name: nginx image: nginx:1.25.4 ports:
    • containerPort: 80 volumeMounts:
    • mountPath: /www name: www
    • mountPath: /etc/nginx/conf.d name: nginx-server-block
  • name: git-pull image: bitnami/git command:
    • /bin/bash
    • -ec
    • | while true; do cd /www && git -c safe.directory=/www pull origin trunk sleep 60 done volumeMounts:
    • mountPath: /www name: www initContainers:
  • name: git-clone image: bitnami/git command:
    • /bin/bash
    • -c
    • | shopt -s dotglob git clone https://code.estradiol.cloud/tamsin/estradiol.cloud.git --no-checkout --branch trunk /tmp/www; cd /tmp/www; p git sparse-checkout init --cone; git sparse-checkout set public; git checkout; mv /tmp/www/* /www volumeMounts:
    • mountPath: /www name: www volumes:
  • name: www emptyDir: {}
  • name: nginx-server-block configMap: name: nginx-server-block ` >}}

my Hugo workflow now looks like:

  1. make changes to source;
  2. run hugo --gc --minify;5
  3. commit & push.

the only active process from this point is my little control loop running git pull.

Getting Web

my Pod is running. everything is great. if i want to browse to my website i just need to setup a port-forward

TK: YAML counts as software.

conveniently, Bitnami maintains a Helm Chart that

diagram: helm setup

Getting Flux'd

by this point i'm pretty git push-pilled and i'm thinking i don't much like having this helm client software installed on my laptop.

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

{{< code-details summary="release.yaml" lang="yaml" details=apiVersion: helm.toolkit.fluxcd.io/v2beta1 kind: HelmRelease metadata: name: web namespace: estradiol-cloud spec: interval: 5m chart: spec: chart: nginx version: '15.12.2' sourceRef: kind: HelmRepository name: bitnami namespace: default interval: 1m values: cloneStaticSiteFromGit: enabled: true repository: "https://code.estradiol.cloud/tamsin/estradiol.cloud.git" branch: trunk gitClone: command: - /bin/bash - -ec - | [[ -f "/opt/bitnami/scripts/git/entrypoint.sh" ]] && source "/opt/bitnami/scripts/git/entrypoint.sh" git clone {{ .Values.cloneStaticSiteFromGit.repository }} --no-checkout --branch {{ .Values.cloneStaticSiteFromGit.branch }} /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/ ingress: enabled: true hostname: estradiol.cloud ingressClassName: nginx tls: true annotations: { cert-manager.io/cluster-issuer: letsencrypt-prod } serverBlock: |- server { listen 8080; root /app/public; index index.html; } service: type: ClusterIP>}}

Scenario 1: Across columns

A Note About Software

at this point i'm forced to admit there's still a lot of software involved in this. setting aside the stuff that provisions and scales my cluster nodes, i have:

  • nginx (running from a stock image);
  • git & bash (running from a stock image);
  • a remote git server (i'm running gitea6, but github dot com is fine here);
  • Kubernetes (oops!);
    • fluxcd;
      • especially kustomize-controller and helm-controller;
    • nginx-ingress controller;
  • the bitnami/nginx Helm chart;

i get to maintain my two bash scripts for git-clone and git-pull, my NGINX config, and a couple of blobs of YAML.

at least there are no webhooks.

fin

  1. i appreciate the culinary theme. ↩︎

  2. unlikely. ↩︎

  3. few of which could be considered relevant for my project. ↩︎

  4. i absolutely will not need this ↩︎

  5. i added disableHTML = true to [minify] configuration in hugo.toml to keep HTML diffs readable. ↩︎

  6. because i'm running gitea in my cluster and i want to avoid a circular dependency for my flux source repository, i also depend on GitLab dot com. ↩︎