Using CircleCI to deploy a Hugo site on S3

This article runs you through how I deployed this blog.

Overview

• The source code is hosted on GitHub
• CircleCI builds the site (HTML pages) using Hugo
• CircleCI deploys the site to an AWS S3 bucket
• AWS CloudFront is configured to serve the content of that S3 bucket with a free TLS certificate from ACM

Static Site Generator

A static site generator turns a set of documents into a static website (HTML pages). If you’re looking for one, this website lists them: StaticGen.

My generator of choice is Hugo.

I wrote another post on how to get started with Hugo:

• Getting started with Hugo static site generator.

AWS Infrastructure

I’m using the following components:

• ACM TLS certificate for my own domain name, validated using DNS records. This is used to provide HTTPS termination from the CloudFront distribution.
• S3 bucket with private ACL to host the files (the website HTML pages).
• CloudFront distribution pointing to that S3 bucket as origin.

This other article explains how I deployed them using Terraform:

• Using Terraform to deploy a Cloudfront distribution with HTTPS that points to an S3 bucket

CircleCI

I use CircleCI to build and deploy the site to the S3 bucket.

I’m using this Dockerfile to build an image that contains awscli and hugo, in which my blog repository will be pulled by CircleCI:

Dockerfile

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FROM circleci/python:buster
WORKDIR /tmp
RUN curl -LO https://github.com/gohugoio/hugo/releases/download/v0.74.3/hugo_0.74.3_Linux-64bit.deb
RUN sudo dpkg -i hugo_0.74.3_Linux-64bit.deb
RUN pip install awscli --upgrade --user

Then I added this simple script to my blog repository:

publish.sh

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#!/bin/bash
rm -R public/
hugo
~/.local/bin/aws s3 sync public/ s3://my-s3-bucket --delete

A minimal CircleCI configuration like this one will execute the publish script when you commit to master:

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aliases:
  defaults: &defaults
    docker:
      - image: lussier/hugo-aws-build:v0.74.3

version: 2

jobs:
  deploy:
    <<: *defaults
    steps:
      - checkout
      - run: hugo
      - run: ./publish.sh

workflows:
  version: 2
  deploy:
    jobs:
      - deploy:
          filters:
            branches:
              only:
                - master

Note that the CircleCI project must be configured with an AWS access key and secret key pair to be authorized to make the API calls to AWS using the AWS CLI.