Create a blog site on GitHub Pages

If you use Unix-style system, I recommend you to follow the Hugo Quick Start and Hosting on GitHub Pages to create a blog to GitHub pages within 5 mins.

When I decided to use hugo to create a blog on GitHub pages from my windows machine, it took me over 30 mins. I hope this blog can help someone want to do sth similar within Windows environment.*

Step 1 - Plan and prepare

Prerequisite

• You already have Hugo on your computer. If not, please follow the instruction to install hugo on Windows.

Manage your github repositories

• You will have two repositories blog-hugo and <username>.github.io repositories to hold your hugo content and blog site respectively.

• The blog-hugo repository will host actual Hugo’s blog content.

• <username>.github.io repository repository will host the static website.

Manage your blog site

• Your Hugo blog folder will be “C:\git\blog-hugo” in this example.

• Your blog site will finally sit in C driver and map to repositories as follow

  C:\>
  |--git 
      |--blog-hugo (https://github.com/<yourname>/blog-hugo.git
          |--archetypes
          |--content
          |--data
          |--layouts
          |--public (https://github.com/<yourname>/<yourname>.github.io.git)
          |--themes
          |--
  
  

Step -2: Create a blog site

Create github repositories

• Create on GitHub blog-hugo and .github.io repositories repository via GitHub website

Create a bloodily good blog site

• Clone blog-hugo via Windows command prompt

  c:\>
  c:\>cd git
  c:\git>git clone <<your-project>-hugo-url> && cd <your-project>-hugo
  

• Create hugo site and setup the theme you like

  C:\git>hugo new site blog-hugo
  C:\git>hugo server -t <yourtheme> -D
  

Setup a sub module for publish

• Clean up the public folder

• Set submodule inside the blog-hugo and map to folder public

  C:\>cd git/blog-hugo
  C:\git>del /s /q  /f  public\*
  C:\git>rd /s /q public
  C:\git>git submodule add -b master https://github.com/<username>/<username>.github.io.git public
  

Deploy to Github page

• Deploy the blog site to GitHub page with the script deploy.bat.

• deploy.bat "Your optional commit message" will commit the changes to <username>.github.io. You can use and tailor the script below as your deploy.bat

  @echo OFF
  
  echo  Deploying updates to GitHub...
  
  REM Build the project. 
  hugo -t <yourtheme> -D
  
  REM Go To Public folder
  cd public
  
  REM Add changes to git.
  git add -A
  
  REM Commit changes.
  set msg="rebuilding site %date%"
  if  NOT "%1"==""    set msg=%1
  git commit -m '%msg%'
  
  REM Push source and build repos.
  git push origin master
  
  REM Come Back
  cd ..
  

• You might want to commit the changes to blog-hugo repository. Please don’t forget to add public into the .gitignore.