I’ve written before about how I deploy this blog using Drone.io. It works well, and does exactly what you’d expect.

Lately I’ve started looking into reducing complexity in homelab systems that I use — and using “a Continuous Integration platform for busy development teams” felt a bit overkill for this tiny blog.

So I switched to something simple; GNU Make.

This blog is built with Hugo — an open-source static site generator. Static websites require no server side processing, which makes them easier to host and opens up new hosting possibilities.

There are many options out there, but I deploy my website to AWS S3, using CloudFront to distribute it globally (aka. make it fast).

Here is the why and the how.

I am building my Hugo website on a local LXC container, using Gitea and Drone. There are plenty of tutorials on how to connected those two together, so I won’t go through that here.

Instead I want to show you how I build and deploy my staging and production environment to Nginx — using atomic deployments and unique preview URLs.