new post: deploy-hugo-neocities-github-actions

content/posts/deploy-hugo-neocities-github-actions/index.md

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+---
+title: "Deploying a Hugo Site to Neocities with GitHub Actions"
+date: 2024-01-21
+# lastmod: 2024-01-21
+description: "Using GitHub Actions to automatically deploy a Hugo website to Neocities."
+featured: false
+toc: true
+comments: true
+categories: Backstage
+tags:
+  - hugo
+  - meta
+  - serverless
+---
+I came across [Neocities](https://neocities.org) many months ago, and got really excited by the premise: a free web host with the mission to bring back the *"fun, creativity and independence that made the web great."* I spent a while scrolling through the [gallery](https://neocities.org/browse) of personal sites and was amazed by both the nostalgic vibes and the creativity on display. It's like a portal back to when the web was fun. Neocities seemed like something I wanted to be a part of, so I signed up for an account... and soon realized that I didn't *really* want to go back to crafting artisinal HTML by hand like I did in the early '00s. I didn't see an easy way to leverage my preferred static site generator[^lazy] so I filed it away and moved on.
+
+[^lazy]: Also I'm kind of lazy, and not actually much of a web design person anyway.
+
+Until yesterday, when I saw [Sophie](https://social.lol/@sophie)'s post, [How I deploy my Eleventy site to Neocities](https://localghost.dev/blog/how-i-deploy-my-eleventy-site-to-neocities/). I hadn't realized that Neocities had an [API](https://neocities.org/api), or that there was a [deploy-to-neocities](https://github.com/bcomnes/deploy-to-neocities) GitHub Action which uses that API to push content to Neocities. With that new-to-me information, I thought I'd give Neocities another try - a real one this time.
+
+I'd been hosting this site on Netlify's free plan [for a couple of year](/hello-hugo/) and haven't really had any problems. But I saw Neocities as a better vision of the internet, and I wanted to be a part of that[^passion]. So last night I signed up for the $5/month [Neocities Supporter](https://neocities.org/supporter) plan, which comes with support for custom domains and more bandwidth than even a paid Netlify plan.
+
+[^passion]: Plus I love supporting passion projects.
+
+I knew I'd need to make some changes to Sophie's workflow since I build my site with Hugo rather than Eleventy. I did some poking around and found [GitHub Actions for Hugo](https://github.com/peaceiris/actions-hugo) which would take care of installing Hugo for me. Then I'd just need to render the HTML with `hugo --minify` and use the [Torchlight](/spotlight-on-torchlight/) CLI to mark up the code blocks. Along the way, I discovered that I needed to overwrite `/not_found.html` to insert my custom 404 page so I included an extra step to do that. And then I'd finally be ready to push the results to Neocities.
+
+So after some trial and error, I came up with this workflow:
+
+### The Workflow
+```yaml
+# torchlight! {"lineNumbers": true}
+# .github/workflows/deploy-to-neocities.yml
+name: Deploy to Neocities
+
+on:
+  schedule:
+    - cron: 0 13 * * *
+  push:
+    branches:
+      - main
+
+concurrency:
+  group: deploy-to-neocities
+  cancel-in-progress: true
+
+defaults:
+  run:
+    shell: bash
+
+jobs:
+  deploy:
+    name: Build and deploy Hugo site
+    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
+    steps:
+      # Install Hugo in the runner
+      - name: Hugo setup
+        uses: peaceiris/actions-hugo@v2.6.0
+        with:
+          hugo-version: '0.121.1'
+          extended: true
+      # Check out the source for the site
+      - name: Checkout
+        uses: actions/checkout@v4
+        with:
+          submodules: recursive
+      # Build the site with Hugo
+      - name: Build with Hugo
+        run: hugo --minify
+      # Copy my custom 404 page to not_found.html so it
+      # will be picked up by Neocities
+      - name: Insert 404 page
+        run: |
+          cp public/404/index.html public/not_found.html
+      # Highlight code blocks with the Torchlight CLI
+      - name: Highlight with Torchlight
+        run: |
+          npm i @torchlight-api/torchlight-cli
+          npx torchlight
+      # Push the rendered site to Neocities and
+      # clean up any orphaned files
+      - name: Deploy to Neocities
+        uses: bcomnes/deploy-to-neocities@v1
+        with:
+          api_token: ${{ secrets.NEOCITIES_API_TOKEN }}
+          cleanup: true
+          dist_dir: public
+```
+
+I'm thrilled with how well this works, and happy to have learned a bit more about GitHub Actions in the process. Big thanks to Sophie for pointing me in the right direction!