When I originally moved my blog away from Tumblr, I followed the below pages:

In short, this blog is:

  • maintained in a Github repository
  • deployed with Google Cloud Build
  • hosted in Firebase.

This got me almost all of the way there. I encountered the below traps:

  • Git submodules
  • failing to add public/[a-z]* to .gitignore and .gcloudignore

submodules

When initiating builds, GCP did not seem to clone the submodules referenced in the Git repository containing this Hugo blog. The Hugo theme I use is imported via a submodule. The result was that the Hugo build step would appear to succeed but no HTML content would be generated, and a bunch of 404s would ensue. Not ideal!

I addressed this by adding a submodules step to my cloudbuild.yaml, and making Hugo wait for it:

steps:
- id: 'submodules'
  name: 'gcr.io/cloud-builders/git'
  entrypoint: 'bash'
  args:
  - '-c'
  - |
    git submodule init
    git submodule update
- id: 'hugo'
  name: 'gcr.io/$PROJECT_ID/hugo'
  waitFor: ['submodules']

public directory content

While messing about with cloudbuild.yaml I submitted a bunch of builds via the commandline. I noticed that I’d accidentally committed the contents of a locally-rendered public directory. I fixed that and added it to .gitignore.

# hugo
public/[a-z]*

This is not the whole story, however. When builds are submitted via commandline, eg. with gcloud builds submit --config=cloudbuild.yaml ., the current directory is copied into the build context, so it’s theoretically possible for content in public/ that was rendered locally (eg. with hugo server) to be inadvertently published. Not good. To fix this, I created a .gcloudignore file. Conveniently, these support referencing another file, so I simply told it to include my entire .gitignore file (and itself):

.gcloudignore
#!include:.gitignore

When I looked at it, Google’s example included .git in the ignore list. This broke the Git submodule initialisation step described above, so I removed it and all was fine after that.

wrapup

With these two issues sorted, I feel a lot happier about my workflow. I can now author with Hugo locally and push to Github with confidence that I won’t break my blog quite as easily.