So I’m still just getting warmed up with some of these new tools and am all thumbs. I recognize the criticality of getting familiarized with the blogging process and making sure that my content is being version controlled and published appropriately; however, I’m also trying to avoid getting wrested away from my defined focus with the many tangential rabbit holes littering my way on this journey.
Github Deployments
My first aim was to get the Hexo deployment process configured to post directly to my Github account. In planning for this, I became aware of something called Github Pages, which is probably not new, I’ve just become hopelessly out of touch with what’s going on in the modern development world. This is a free space for me to post a web page or site using my own Github account. Since I’ve typically viewed Github as a storage repository for verion control, I also figured I would want to deploy my Hexo source files there, while I would deploy my generated files in the Github Pages location. Also, since I have my own web hosting with a private domain name, I wanted to configure this process to deploy there, as well. From a quick review of the docs, it seems that I can do exactly what I want… piece of cake!
Well, in order to deploy both my generated files and my source files to Github Pages and a supporting repo, I need to use Github Actions to make this work. I took a stab at the instructions found here to get this working, but had issue right out of the gate. As I tried to read more about Github Actions, i started feeling like I was slipping into my first rabbit hole and decided, rather quickly, that maybe this is not a necessary route, for now.
Hexo Deployment Plug-ins
There is also an option for One-Command Deployments for Hexo that has different plug-ins available to serve your needs. My first need is to get my stuff pushed to Github and for that, I can use a plug-in called hexo-deployer-git. The only caveat with going this route is that it will only deploy my generated files to my Github Pages location, but not allow me to push the source to a standard repo. Although this is not my perfect world, I’m going to go ahead with this and just back up my source files manually using the standard git processes, which I need practice with anyway. I went ahead with the steps outlined and installed this plug-in, updated my _config.yml file with my Github details, then ran hexo clean && hexo deploy to generate my site and push to my Github Page. After verifying with between Github and VS Code that this was what I wanted, my Hex Blog is live on amen2that.github.io/!
Now that I’ve gotten my content on my Github page, I think about how I didn’t even know what that was until this week and so clearly, it isn’t what I set out to do. What I really want is to get this blog posted on my private domain. Fortunately, there’s a plug-in for that too called hexo-deployer-sftp. This, too, seems pretty straight forward, but I notice a warning on it’s github repo just warning you that it will delete everything off your server to match what you are deploying, which isn’t what i want to do. I figure I could test this and figure out how to make it work, but obviously my first step will be to back up what’s out there, thengo to work with tests… these fucking rabbits man!
I’m going to back up a second here… why do i need to deploy using Hexo? I can use VS Code to SFTP whatever files I want to my site really, really easily, using a process I’m already familiar with… SFTP!!! I mean… what the hell am I doing here. So the new steps are going to be to simply generate my pages using hexo generate, then just push them the old fashioned way from VS Code using SFTP. I mean… WTAF.