Hosting

Prerequisites

Before deploying, make sure your site builds locally with hugo without errors.

Deploy to GitHub Pages

GitHub Pages builds your site using GitHub Actions. The workflow installs Hugo, runs Pagefind, and publishes the result. Your repository must be hosted on GitHub.

1. In your repository, go to Settings > Pages.

2. Under Build and deployment, set the source to GitHub Actions.

3. Create .github/workflows/deploy.yml. The workflow has two jobs: build checks out the repo, installs Hugo and Node dependencies, builds the site, runs Pagefind, and uploads the output as an artifact. deploy then publishes that artifact to GitHub Pages.

   .github/workflows/deploy.yml

   name: Deploy to GitHub Pages
   
   on:
     push:
       branches:
         - main
     workflow_dispatch:
   
   permissions:
     contents: read
     pages: write
     id-token: write
   
   concurrency:
     group: pages
     cancel-in-progress: false
   
   jobs:
     build:
       runs-on: ubuntu-latest
       steps:
         - name: Checkout
           uses: actions/checkout@v6
           with:
             submodules: recursive
             fetch-depth: 0  # Optional, for enableGitInfo
   
         - name: Install Hugo
           uses: peaceiris/actions-hugo@v3
           with:
             hugo-version: '0.161.0'
             extended: true
   
         - name: Setup Pages
           id: pages
           uses: actions/configure-pages@v6
   
         - name: Setup NodeJS
           uses: actions/setup-node@v6
           with:
             node-version: '22'
   
         - name: Install dependencies
           run: npm install
   
         - name: Build site
           run: hugo --gc --minify --baseURL "${{ steps.pages.outputs.base_url }}"
   
         - name: Index with Pagefind
           run: npm run pagefind
   
         - uses: actions/upload-pages-artifact@v3
           with:
             path: public
   
     deploy:
       needs: build
       runs-on: ubuntu-latest
       environment:
         name: github-pages
         url: ${{ steps.deployment.outputs.page_url }}
       steps:
         - id: deployment
           uses: actions/deploy-pages@v4

4. Commit and push the file. GitHub Actions will trigger automatically.

Deploy to Other Hosting Services

See Hugo's official tutorial. Add npm run pagefind to your build step to generate the search index.