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2024-01-21
I came across Neocities [1] many months ago, and got really excited by the premise: a free web host with the mission to bring back the *"fun, creativity and independence that made the web great."* I spent a while scrolling through the gallery [2] of personal sites and was amazed by both the nostalgic vibes and the creativity on display. It's like a portal back to when the web was fun. Neocities seemed like something I wanted to be a part of so I signed up for an account... and soon realized that I didn't *really* want to go back to crafting artisinal HTML by hand like I did in the early '00s. I didn't see an easy way to leverage my preferred static site generator so I filed it away and moved on.
Until yesterday, when I saw a post from Sophie [3] on How I deploy my Eleventy site to Neocities [4]. I hadn't realized that Neocities had an API [5], or that there was a deploy-to-neocities [6] GitHub Action which uses that API to push content to Neocities. With that new-to-me information, I thought I'd give Neocities another try - a real one this time.
[4] How I deploy my Eleventy site to Neocities
I had been hosting this site on Netlify's free plan for a couple of years [7] and haven't really encountered any problems. But I saw Neocities as a better vision of the internet, and I wanted to be a part of that. So last night I upgraded to the $5/month Neocities Supporter [8] plan which would let me use a custom domain for my site (along with higher storage and bandwidth limits).
I knew I'd need to make some changes to Sophie's workflow since my site is built with Hugo rather than Eleventy. I did some poking around and found GitHub Actions for Hugo [9] which would take care of installing Hugo for me. Then I'd just need to render the HTML with `hugo --minify` and use the Torchlight [10] CLI to mark up the code blocks. Along the way, I also discovered that I'd need to overwrite `/not_found.html` to insert my custom 404 page so I included an extra step to do that. After that, I'll finally be ready to push the results to Neocities.
It took a bit of trial and error, but I eventually adapted this workflow which does the trick:
# .github/workflows/deploy-to-neocities.yml
name: Deploy to Neocities
on:
# Daily build to catch any future-dated posts
schedule:
- cron: 0 13 * * *
# Build on pushes to the main branch only
push:
branches:
- main
concurrency:
group: deploy-to-neocities
cancel-in-progress: true
defaults:
run:
shell: bash
jobs:
deploy:
name: Build and deploy Hugo site
runs-on: ubuntu-latest
steps:
# Install Hugo in the runner
- name: Hugo setup
uses: peaceiris/actions-hugo@v2.6.0
with:
hugo-version: '0.121.1'
extended: true
# Check out the source for the site
- name: Checkout
uses: actions/checkout@v4
with:
submodules: recursive
# Build the site with Hugo
- name: Build with Hugo
run: hugo --minify
# Copy my custom 404 page to not_found.html so it
# will be picked up by Neocities
- name: Insert 404 page
run: |
cp public/404/index.html public/not_found.html
# Highlight code blocks with the Torchlight CLI
- name: Highlight with Torchlight
run: |
npm i @torchlight-api/torchlight-cli
npx torchlight
# Push the rendered site to Neocities and
# clean up any orphaned files
- name: Deploy to Neocities
uses: bcomnes/deploy-to-neocities@v1
with:
api_token: ${{ secrets.NEOCITIES_API_TOKEN }}
cleanup: true
dist_dir: public
I'm thrilled with how well this works, and happy to have learned a bit more about GitHub Actions in the process. Big thanks to Sophie for pointing me in the right direction!
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Generate a Dynamic robots.txt File in Hugo with External Data Sources
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