Once in a blue moon I check if older projects still work. When updating this blog, I got greeted by this message:

Damn you My Team, and the unwillingness to fix these errors.
Either way: I’m putting some time aside to fix this while the daughters watch Frozen, so let’s get to it. They’re building a snowman already.

Checking if there is a new build pack

Normally, updating the default build pack should fix this. So lets see if there is a new one:

Alrighty! Let’s check the hugo version we are running. The command hugo version yields hugo v0.140.1-a9b0b95ef402a1cc70bc5386d649d947e2bcc027+extended. There might be some confusion on the versioning, but 1.9.1 is not the version of hugo.
It is the version of the build pack. This version uses hugo v0.125.2 as last available version.

The solution

Digitalocean apps get built in one of two ways:

  1. Use a default build pack
  2. Include a docker image that builds your site

After this issue with build packs, I know I will always include a dockerfile to get this built.

FROM hugomods/hugo:exts

COPY . /src
# Build commands: https://gohugo.io/commands/hugo_build/
RUN hugo build --minify

We use the hugomods images, since these look pretty comprehensive. There is nothing holding you back from using alpine and installing hugo yourself though. The hugo:exts image has a lot of extra’s like postCSS also included, so this should cover most cases. docker build . builds your site.

Deploying the dockerfile

git push your changes to a repository. Since you can’t change the deploy system for an app, we’ll have to create a new one.

If the dockerfile was uploaded correctly, you should have the following resources: edit resources

This is going to sound weird, but we are going to delete the static site that will be auto-detected as hugo, and we are going to change the web service so that it becomes a static site. The reason for this is that the existence of a dockerfile creates the default service. In this case, we are going to use the dockerfile to build the static site, not to deploy a service.

edit resource type

Change the resource type from service to static site. Then, change the output directory to /src/public. The public part is where Hugo will build the site. The src part is required since that is where we copy our files to in the dockerfile itself.

change output directory

The HTTP request route can just be ‘/’ as well, if it’s only this blog in the digitalocean app.

There should be nothing else to set up. The last important step here is to check the billing, which should be a cool 0.00 for a static site. billing overview

  • hugomods has a more concise version of this post. I just found out after writing this though, so I figured I’d just post this.
  • This is a digitalocean referral link if anyone wants to try. Referrals give you (the clicker) $200 dollars in credits for 60 days. They provide me with $25 when someone actually buys in for a month.