Initial Setup

Irritation. When I am confused for too long, or somebody nit-picks my pull request. Or when something takes much longer than I expected – which happens often.

From Milosz Danczak

Scaleway dropped my old blog server (after lots of warning, I just put it off) so I decided to resurrect jonwear.com and run it on Netlify. I’d set up a blog on netlify before and remembered it wasn’t much trouble, so thought I’d do it again.

The initial setup was fine. I downloaded Hugo and setup a site that ran fine locally. However, I could not get it to deploy on netfliy. Kept getting errors about the git submodule not being found. There comes a point in trouble shooting an “easy” task where I start to lose my mind. I learned how to uninstall a git submodule (not easy has as adding one) to no avail. I gave up and started the repo from scratch. Nothing worked. I kept following these directions:

cd YOUR_PROJECT_DIRECTORY
git init
git submodule add https://github.com/THEME_CREATOR/THEME_NAME

But, I was running the git submodule command from the project directory, not the themes directory. Somewhere along the way, I realized I should run the submodule add command from within the themes directory. Boom, it worked fine.

As I was writing this blog post, I went back over the Hugo site and looked at their docs for like the millionth time and noticed something…

This image looks like it’s saying the same as the netlify instructions:

small hugo

Other than the path to the theme, it looks exactly the same, right? But if I hover over that with my mouse, that frame expands and shows this:

wide hugo

That last argument tells the submodule command where to put the theme, but I was leaving that off every time(RAGE) because I couldn’t see it. I’m guessing because I’m 48 and my fonts are big. If you run the submodule command as I’d been running it (without that themes location argument), it will work if you’re in the themes directory already. So once I figured that out, the rest went pretty easily. Updated DNS, used the Netfliy integration with Let’s Encrypt and I was good to go.