Static website with Hugo and Nix

This website is built with Hugo, a static site generator, and built with Nix¹. This approach ensures the build won’t break in the future because the content, generator and builder are all unchanged.

The configuration 

Nix flakes is still an experimental feature but has been available for a long time.

A flake is simply a source tree (such as a Git repository) containing a file named flake.nix that provides a standardized interface to Nix artifacts such as packages or NixOS modules. Flakes can have dependencies on other flakes, with a “lock file” pinning those dependencies to exact revisions to ensure reproducible evaluation.

– https://www.tweag.io/blog/2020-05-25-flakes/

Here is the flake.nix of this website:

{
  description = "My personal website";
  inputs.nixpkgs.url = "github:NixOS/nixpkgs/nixos-23.05";
  inputs.flake-utils.url = "github:numtide/flake-utils";

  outputs = { self, nixpkgs, flake-utils }:
    flake-utils.lib.eachDefaultSystem (system:
      let pkgs = nixpkgs.legacyPackages.${system};
      in {
        packages.website = pkgs.stdenv.mkDerivation {
          name = "blog";
          src = self;
          buildPhase = "${pkgs.hugo}/bin/hugo";
          installPhase = "cp -r public $out";
        };

        defaultPackage = self.packages.${system}.website;
        devShells.default = pkgs.mkShell { packages = [ pkgs.hugo ]; };
      });
}

Everytime I clone the repo, there are two options:

• run nix develop to enter a pure environment with the hugo program.
• run nix build to get the static website in the ./result directory.

It eliminates the need to worry about the development will be broken in the future.

Auto deployment 

I use sourcehut to host my website. When I pushed to the git repository, it will be deployed automatically using the sourcehut build service. In the build, nix build uses flake.nix to create exactly same environment as in development:

image: nixos/latest
oauth: pages.sr.ht/PAGES:RW
packages:
- nixos.hut
environment:
  NIX_CONFIG: experimental-features = nix-command flakes
  site: yejun.dev
tasks:
- package: |
    cd $site
    nix build
    tar -C result -cvz . > ../site.tar.gz
- upload: |
    hut pages publish -d $site site.tar.gz

Written on Oct 7, 2023