This is how my static website works

A quick write-up on the tech stack used to maintain this website with minimal effort and zero costs (other than the domain name).

The tools

Hugo

Hugo is an open-source static site generator tool written in Go that has been the fastest for my needs. It is flexible enough to allow me fine-tune for SEO, generate sitemaps, and so far the build speed is just astonishing. Everytime I need to publish a new change to the website it takes less than a minute.

So far I’m writing content with markdown files and I’ve just scratched the surface on what’s possible with Hugo. In the future I’d like to use some hosting service optimized for image sharing, where I can host photos and share them through my website instead of Instagram.

Cloudflare Pages

I like Cloudflare products. A few years ago I followed a quick tutorial on how to use Cloudflare Pages and it was so, so simple and straightforward. Cloudflare Pages was the right option for me, since one of my goals with a personal website is to have a performant experience for visitors and my use case right now gits perfectly: static generated website, globally cached with a secure CDN without server management.

The free tier (as of the day I’m writing this) allows one build at a time, with 500 builds per month, unlimited sites, unlimited static requests and unlimited bandwidth. Pretty awesome.

Github

Github is where I host the code for my website and most of my side projects. Cloudflare Pages also integrates with Gitlab, so GitHub is not a mandatory option here. I’m just used to GitHub so that’s the option I choose.

That’s it

This blog post was intended to mention the tools used for this website. I might write a separate post to cover the step-by-step, covering how to create a Hugo project, host it on Github and setting up a release process with Cloudflare Pages.