From the course: Learning Static Site Building with Hugo

Publishing options for static sites

From the course: Learning Static Site Building with Hugo

Start my 1-month free trial

Publishing options for static sites

“

- [Instructor] Once you've built some pages and know how to generate the site's content files, it's time to explore getting your site on the internet. The HTML CSS and image files that make up your site won't do any good sitting on your computer. To make your site public, you'll need to put those files on a server that can host them for you. There are many ways you can do this. Since there's nothing special about these files, you could manually copy them up to a web server. That works, but it gets old after a few updates. In this course, you'll learn how to set up an automated process that will push your files to one of three destinations. First I'll show you how to upload your site to an FTP server. FTP is a common approach that's used with many inexpensive web hosting companies. If you already have access to a web server that supports FTP, use these instructions. If you don't already have a web server, I'll show you how to publish your site using Amazon Web Services, or AWS. This option costs only a few cents per month, but you do need to complete some configuration steps first. The third option is to publish your site using a service built specifically for static sites call Netlify. This is by far the easiest option and it's the one I'd recommend starting with if you're not sure which one to pick. There are a few things that you'll need regardless of which deployment approach you choose. We'll use GitHub to store the sites files for free and then set up another free service called Travis CI to run automated scripts every time you make a change. You'll also need to grab a real domain name for your new site. I got awesomestaticsites.com. Then you can pick a path you'd like to learn. Deploy via FTP, deploy to AWS, or deploy with Netlify. Alright, let's get started on those prerequisites.

Contents