Generating This Site

2024-06-12

Currently this site is generated with Zola, styled with Pico CSS, and published on GitHub Pages. It replaces a previous half-hearted attempt at creating a site using Jekyll.

The source for the site can be found on GitHub.

# Resources

• Zola
• Pico CSS

# Why Zola?

My primary complaint with Jekyll was that I was never quite sure that my local setup matched what was being used on GitHub. As someone who doesn't use Ruby often I found it cumbersome to keep Jekyll configured and updated on Windows.

While searching for alternatives I mostly prioritized ease of setup. My customization needs are pretty low and I'm fairly certain any of the popular static site generators would easily meet my requirements. Browsing this list of generators I ended up with Hugo and Zola on my short list. Both are easily installed as a single application without much fuss. The tiebreaker for my decision was that Zola is written in Rust and I've been playing around with learning Rust lately.

# Styles

I chose Pico CSS after a brief overview of classless CSS options. It was downloaded and installed manually to the static directory of the site source as suggested by the documentation.

# Publishing

The site is published using a GitHub Actions workflow. I used the Zola default workflow as a starting point. However, the default workflow publishes the site by committing to the gh-pages branch which didn't quite work as I wanted for this repository. The source for this site is located in my user page repository, so by default it expected to find the published site in main. Although I could change the expected branch in the settings, it felt awkward to have commits to main produce a second commit to gh-pages.

Instead I opted to set the BUILD_ONLY flag in the Zola step and move publishing to separate steps using Pages specific actions. Putting it all together I ended up with the following.

name: Deploy to Pages

on:
  push:
    branches:
      - main
  workflow_dispatch:

permissions:
  contents: read
  pages: write
  id-token: write

concurrency:
  group: "pages"
  cancel-in-progress: false

jobs:
  build_and_publish:
    name: Publish site
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - name: Checkout main
        uses: actions/checkout@v4
      - name: Zola build
        uses: shalzz/zola-deploy-action@v0.18.0
        env:
          BUILD_ONLY: true
      - name: Configure Pages
        uses: actions/configure-pages@v5
      - name: Upload artifact
        uses: actions/upload-pages-artifact@v3
        with:
          path: "public"
      - name: Deploy to GitHub Pages
        id: deployment
        uses: actions/deploy-pages@v4