Continuing on from my last blog outlining how to get a blog started locally using hugo and a handful of commands in a shell terminal, this blog I’m going to show how to use Bitbucket and Aerobatic to deploy that blog to a static website backed by a global CDN so it is super duper responsive.

One thing that you’ll need to create to make this as simple as possible is a manifest file so that Aerobatic knows how to build & deploy your site. To do this you need to create a new file in the root of your site (where config.toml also lives) called package.json.

Paste the following code into the package.json file you created:

{
  "_aerobatic": {
    "build": {
      "engine": "hugo",
      "themeRepo": "https://github.com/digitalcraftsman/hugo-hikari-theme.git"
    }
  }
}

Note: themeRepo is optional; for this example we’re going to include it which will result in the theme contents being automatically grabbed and deployed from the remote git repository, rather than the files that I have stored locally.

Once you’ve done this, you need to create a git repository. For this example I’m using Bitbucket - mostly because of it’s excellent integration with Aerobatic thanks to Atlassian Connect for Bitbucket, but partially because I am biased due to the fact I work for Atlassian.

So here are the high level steps involved:

1. Create an account at Bitbucket if you don’t have one already
2. Create a new repository (named something appropriate for your site)
3. Grab the HTTPS URL reference for this repository (Clone -> Change to HTTPS -> Grab the full URL)

Once you’ve done the above and have a HTTPS reference to your git repo, you can get to work with deployment! In the folder where you created the blog in Part 1 of this post:

git init
git add .
git commit -m "My first commit to bitbucket for this awesome repository"
git remote add origin https://url-from-step-3-above
git push origin master

With those 5 commands, you’ve turned your folder into a git repo, added all the files into the index, made your first commit, linked it to the git repository that you created earlier and pushed your changes to Bitbucket. AWESOME!

The last step is to setup the Aerobatic deployment, which is as simple as:

1. Pressing the “Aerobatic Hosting” button within your Repo on Bitbucket
2. Entering the name that you want for the website (if something other than the repo name)
3. Pressing deploy

In seconds, your blog will be available at http://reponame.aerobatic.io and accessible to all! Similarly, anytime you push updates to the repository, Aerobatic will pickup these changes and redeploy your website with the refreshed content. DOUBLE AWESOME!!

That’s it for now; reach out with any questions!