Setting Up This Website

Technologies / platforms

• Hugo
• Netlify
• GoDaddy

Steps

Website

• Installed Hugo and set up the website as per:
  • Quick Start | Hugo
  • Excellent video tutorials Hugo | Mike Dane
• Created a remote on GitHub to store the website
  • I added an ignore for /public - this is built, so shouldn’t be committed.
• Added the theme: https://github.com/zwbetz-gh/minimal-bootstrap-hugo-theme.git
• Set up a favicon using Favicon Generator for perfect icons on all browsers as per the instructions in the theme readme. NB the favicon didn’t update on the test page from the local server, but it worked in Chrome, so putting it down to a caching issue.

Hosting

• Set up a Netlify account as per the instructions here: Host on Netlify | Hugo
  • I signed up with my GitHub account.
• Followed the steps to link the git repo to Netlify
• Deploy failed first time because of an issue with Hugo versions. Fixed by adding a netlify.toml file to the repo as per this post Build command failed because of Hugo version - Support - Netlify Support Forums and the steps in the instructions.
• NB stylesheets, favicons etc. didn’t work initially, because they are all set relative to the baseURL parameter in config.toml.
  • To test them, I updated this variable to be the URL that Netlify assigned me. I had to clear caches and deploy to see the style updates.
  • Once the custom domain was set up, I changed this back to real website domain.

Set up custom domain

• Purchased the domain from GoDaddy.com
• Used the instructions in the following documents to set up the DNS records from within GoDaddy:
  • Netlify: Custom Domains with GoDaddy | by Matthew Sedlacek | Level Up Coding
  • Custom domains | Netlify Docs
• Linked the .co.uk domain by setting up forwarding for it to the .com version in GoDaddy .
• https support configured automatically in Netlify once DNS was set up in GoDaddy. This happened within 30 mins.