Hugo Static Site Running on GCP Free Tier VM

This project is to create a site with Hugo and deploy it to GCP in < 5min.

Accompanying Blog Posts:

1. The Making of devopsdirective.com (Hugo, Caddy, + GCP)
2. CI/CD for devopsdirective.com (Hugo + Cloud Build)

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NOTE: For a static site like this, the built in hugo deploy approach to host directly within a GCP/AWS/Azure bucket might be easier/more scalable, but I wanted to familiarize myself with various server options (first I used nginx, and then switched to caddy b/c of its automatic https config!) and eventually want to do some benchmarking on the f1-micro instance to see what kind of load it can handle.

Prerequisites

• Install hugo (brew install hugo)
• Install docker (brew cask install docker)
• Install google cloud sdk (brew cask install google-cloud-sdk && gcloud init)

Site Setup Instructions

Before starting, update the following:

    <SITE_NAME> (within ./Makefile, e.g. my-website)
    <DOMAIN(S)> (within ./Caddyfile, e.g. my-website.com www.my-website.com)
    <EMAIL_ADDRESS> (within ./Caddyfile, e.g. my.name@gmail.com)

to their appropriate values.

0. Run $make create-site (uses https://gohugo.io/getting-started/quick-start/)
   • Creates the hugo site and moves it into this directory
1. Run $make create-project
   • Creates a new GCP project
2. enable billing using the project link output by previous command
3. Run $make vm-setup
   • Enables compute.googleapis.com and containerregistry.googleapis.com
   • Reserves a static IP for the site
   • Adds http and https firewall rules
   • Creates f1-micro vm,
   • Configures your local docker install to use google container registry (gcr)
   • Configures VM docker install to be able to use google container registry
4. Run $make deploy
   • Builds hugo site
   • Builds caddy based docker container containing site files
   • Tags and pushes to gcr
   • Removes currently running containers on VM
   • Starts container on VM using new container image
5. Run $make list-vms --> create A record for domain (not automated)
   • Go to your DNS provider and point your domain to the VM static IP
   • It's also useful to add a www CNAME record (to automatiaclly point requests like www.my-website.com to my-website.com)
   • You also need to update the Caddyfile to reflect your domain and enable TLS

CI/CD Setup Instructions

Before starting, update the following:

    <SITE_NAME> (within ./Makefile, e.g. my-website)
    <REPO_NAME> (within ./Makefile, e.g. my-cloud-source-repo-mirroring-a-github-repo)
    <USER_NAME> (within ./Makefile, e.g. myusername -- this shoud be the username of the user when you SSH into the VM)

to their appropriate values.

0. Mirror GitHub repo in Cloud Source (https://cloud.google.com/source-repositories/docs/mirroring-a-github-repository) -- assuming primary site repo is in GitHub
1. Run `make setup-cloud-build
   • Enables the Cloud Build API
   • Adds the necessary IAM roles to the Cloud Build service account
   • Creates the Cloud build Trigger

TODO:

• Tune caddy config
• Add CDN (eventually)