I used to deploy my blog (yes, this blog, powered by Hugo) to ^[1] GitHub however, I hate the fact that it makes my page repository public and I have to pay in order to privatise it.

So, here it comes, the deployment switch to ^[2] GitLab took place. I referred to the tutorial available in Hugo website, [Hosting on GitLab Pages] and followed the tutorial with a slightly different approach.

Explained below are the steps I took in hosting my blog on GitLab Pages:-

1. Go to the site directory:

   cd hugo-site

2. And then, create a .gitlab-ci.yml file in the root directory of the Hugo site. As explained in the tutorial provided by Hugo,

   "The .gitlab-ci.yml configures the GitLab CI on how to build your page. Simply add the content below."

   image: publysher/hugo
   
   pages:
     script:
     - hugo
     artifacts:
       paths:
       - public
     only:
     - master

3. Create a new repository on GitLab which is not necessarily set to be available publicly. This is where the difference lies between the approach provided in Hugo tutorial and mine. In my case, I created a ^[3] GitLab Pages similar to the one provided by ^[4] GitHub Pages. Since I wanted my blog to be available at https://wraihan.gitlab.io, I created a repository with that name and assigned a SSH key [Deploy keys] to it;
   

   ---

   
4. Do not forget to change the baseurl value in config.toml file with the website URL:

   baseurl = "https://username.gitlab.io/"

   While still in the root directory of the Hugo site, run ‘hugo’ where it will automatically create a /public directory and initialize a new git repository with the following command:-

   git init

   After that, add /public directory to a .gitignore file as there is no need to push compiled assets to GitLab:

   echo "/public" >> .gitignore

   Add submodule for the theme:

   git submodule add git@gitlab.com:wraihan/wrase.git themes/wrase

   And lastly, commit and push codes to master branch:

   git add .

   git commit -m "Initial commit"

   git remote add origin git@gitlab.com:username/username.gitlab.io.git

   git push -u origin master

Now, just wait for the page to be built as initially described in the Hugo tutorial page.

#!/bin/bash

# Add changes to git.
git add .

# Commit changes.
msg="rebuilding site `date`"
if [ $# -eq 1 ]
  then msg="$1"
fi
git commit -m "$msg"

# Push source and build repos.
git push -u origin master

In this case, I just run ‘ ./deploy.sh “commit message” ’ to send changes to the created GitLab Pages repository.

The Downside of GitLab Deployment
The pipeline build jobs can be really really really slow, like it takes forever to complete, which is a [well-known issue] that has been discussed by GitLab users and developers over the past few months.

For now, I will just bear with it until I can no longer tolerate it.