Hosting Your Own Website for Free

Prerequisites

• You have a Github account
• You have a Digital Ocean account
• You have a Linux Server (or VM) that you can use to run your local instance of Hugo

Setting up Github

Creating your Repo

1. Navigate to https://github.com and login
2. Select New

1. Name the Repo, Set it to Private, and select Create Repository

Making your First Commit

1. On your Linux Machine create a directory to store the website in

	mkdir Websites

1. Create your new Repo within this directory

	cd Websites
	git init 

1. Create a Readme File and commit the change

	touch readme.md
	git add -a
	git commit -a -m "Commit Message"

1. Set the Branch to commit the changes to

	git branch -M main

1. Set where these changes should be sent to

	git remote add origin git@github.com:$GITHUB_USERNAME/$REPOSITORY_NAME.git

1. Push your changes to the remote repository

	git push -u origin main

Creating Hugo Site Locally

Installing Hugo

Ubuntu

	sudo apt install hugo

RHEL/CentOS/Fedora

	sudo dnf install hugo

Creating your Website

1. Within the Directory we created run the bellow command to create the File structure that Hugo requires to function

	hugo new site .

Adding a theme

Note: This will very depending on the theme you select. I am using the mainroad theme for writing this walk though since that is what I use

1. Go to https://themes.gohugo.io/ to find a theme you like

2. go to that themes github page and locate the install instructions (often found in the ReadMe)

3. Follow the install instructions

4. Often the theme will have a preconfigured config file that acts as a good starting point. You can set Hugo to use this config file by runnng the following command

	#Backs up current config file
	cp config.toml config.backup
	rm config.toml
	#Copy the Example config to where your config.toml was
	cp theme/$Theme_Name/exampleSite/config.toml .

1. Edit the example config file to your liking

Adding Posts to Hugo

1. Run the bellow command to create the new post

Note: Make sure the command ends in .md otherwise the command will run but will not create the file correctly

	hugo new post/Whatever_You_Want/Whatever_You_Want.md

1. Edit this newly created markdown file in your editor of choice

Setting up Digital Ocean

Setting up your Web app

1. Log into DigitalOcean

2. Select Apps

1. Select Create App

1. Follow the onscreen prompts

Adding a custom URL

Note: This will very depending on your Domain provider

1. Login in to Digital Ocean

2. Select Apps

1. Select the App for your website

2. Select Settings

3. Select Apps

4. Select Settings

1. Select Edit for Domains

1. Select Add Domain

1. Follow the Onscreen directions

Pushing your Updates to Production

If you are following along you should now have a web app set up in DigitalOcean and a empty git repo that the web app is connected to on Github. Bellow is the steps to push any changes you want to make to this web app

Run the following commands in your local Git repo:

	git add -a
	git commit -a -m "Commit Message"
	git push