Building a Blog with Hugo and Deploying to Azure

Happy New Year 2025!

I recently started this blog because I get $150 in Azure credits every month from my company. I bought my domain from Namecheap.

Since I don’t enjoy front-end work and don’t want to use WordPress, I looked for a simple way to start blogging. I wanted to keep my source code on GitHub and use Markdown files. After some research, I found Hugo.

I followed this tutorial to build a Hugo site and deploy it to Azure Static Web Apps. The tutorial is great and covers many details.

However, I did one thing differently. The GitHub actions in the tutorial only uploads the public directory to Azure, which means we need to build/publish the site locally and then upload the public directory to GitHub. I wanted GitHub Actions to handle the build process as well.

So, I added two more steps in GitHub Actions to set up Hugo and build the site. Here are the steps I added:

- name: Setup Hugo
  uses: peaceiris/actions-hugo@v2
  with:
    hugo-version: '0.140.1'
- name: Build site
  run: hugo --minify

Next, I added a custom domain oshinyil.com to Azure Static Web Apps by following this tutorial.

That’s all for today!

Cheers!