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