hugo_build - passing baseurl parameter at build time? (-b)

[houstonhaynes]

I've spent quite a bit of time experimenting and reading/researching the Hugo/blogdown documentation and haven't been able to connect the dots yet. I need to trigger the build from a command line (which I can do) but also pass in the "-b" (baseURL) Hugo parameter.

Is there's a pattern for passing in a Hugo build parameter at the command line?

[tcgriffith]

baseurl is usually set in the config.yaml. could you be more specific about your use case?

[houstonhaynes]

I'm not sure how to be more specific. The point of the question is to pass in an override - to avoid a re-write of the baseURL entry in the config.toml - to use the value that's passed in when the build command is executed.

I have both a staging and production instance of the site - and I want to pass in a value so that the refs are correct per-site when I built based on the integration vs master branch of the repo. It's tiered deployment 101 - re-writing the .toml file (that's ostensibly under source control) after check-out somewhat invalidates the fact that the project is built from source. I can certainly do that, but I thought I might ask for advice.

[tcgriffith]

https://github.com/tcgriffith/owaraisite/blob/master/config.toml

I faced a similar situation like yours. I use "/" as the baseurl so i could deploy it over gh pages and netlify without specifying the baseurl parameter. here is my config.

[houstonhaynes]

Awesome thanks - was just making my way over to the Netlify page. I'm building a deployment pipeline in GitHub Actions (targeting Azure Blob Static Site/CDN).

I was thinking that TOML might be antagonistic to parameter injection due to some early chatter I read while surfing for options. So I thought transitioning to a YAML file might make sense. I'll take a look at what you've put together. Cheers!

[houstonhaynes]

Oh - just to follow up after scanning the Netlify TOML reference and your doc - I think using the slash would handicap some of the social links that cascade from that reference. I found that by deploying into my stg. instance with the "/" ref -- social media embeds just broke in a really ugly way.

I looked at some of the notes on alternate build methods and thought about calling hugo directly, but haven't given it a try yet.

I also thought about copying out the entire repo into a new build target folder, and modifying the TOML/YAML value(s) needed so that everything is ephemeral/local. But that seems like too much "squeeze" for not enough "juice". Thanks for the heads-up.

[tcgriffith]

could you provide your repo? for social links you could provide something like "https://www.github.com" instead of "www.github.com"

I also found this discussion from hugo community, hope this helps:

https://discourse.gohugo.io/t/solved-what-should-be-used-for-the-value-of-site-baseurl/5896/9

[tcgriffith]

I don't have experience with the gh action.

but for netlify, you could push dev branches/Pull request to github and netlify will deploy the preview in a new url and won't affect the master branch for production, fitting your need for staging and production.

[houstonhaynes]

According to the source, unless baseurl=“scheme://url.here/” is set, absURL is rendered useless, and that parts of the site don’t get the .Site.BaseURL paramerter they need, thus rendering the site broken in some cases.

...was precisely what I was seeing.

<meta property="og:url" content="/" />

and Leo's Hugo gist suggested what I was hoping to avoid :) which is running hugo directly.

The [potential] problem with doing the ephemeral build (pushing files with modified config into a local directory) is that it may rob Hugo of the handy little feature I was going to take advantage of to embed Git meta info into generated pages. The idea is to do a "proper" CI workflow and generate tests that parse that meta-info after build, then pushes to the static site. Then the idea is to validate against the static site - invalidate the CDN and then do a final check through the "top" to ensure that the latest versions of the pages are pushed up. (and yes, it's a cheat to also warm the cache)

But as they say - it's can't hurt to try... ;)

[yihui]

hugo_build() is a wrapper function based on hugo_cmd(), so you can actually call the latter directly, e.g.,

blogdown::hugo_cmd(shQuote(c('-b', 'your/custom/base/url')))

[houstonhaynes]

Ah - BINGO! A thousand thank-yous!