TIL: You Can Schedule Posts on Your Hugo Blog using Netlify and Gitlab CI

TIL: You Can Schedule Posts on Your Hugo Blog using Netlify and Gitlab CI

This post in fact will be a scheduled post I’m writing it on the 20th of November but it will be published on the 23rd of November. Assuming we are using Netlify to deploy our website, what we will need to do is trigger a rebuild of our site every day using Gitlab CI. Since Hugo builds a static site to publish our content after a set date we will need to rebuild our site. So let’s see how we can automate that. Else the post won’t be visible until I next make a commit to my main branch.

I use the date field to determine when to make this post visible on my blog, set in the front matter of the post (markdown).

---
title: "TIL: You Can Schedule Posts on Your Hugo Blog using Netlify and Gitlab CI"
canonicalURL: https://haseebmajid.dev/posts/2022-11-23-til-you-can-schedule-posts-on-your-hugo-blog-using-netlify-and-gitlab-ci/
date: 2022-11-23
---

We can do this by first creating a build hook on Netlify, go to your Site Settings (on Netlify) then Build and Deploy. Copy the build hook cURL request example which will look like curl -X POST -d {} https://api.netlify.com/build_hooks/[id].

Netlify Build Hook

Next, go to Gitlab and open your Settings > CI/CD settings and add a new variable called NETLIFY_DEPLOY_WEBHOOK and copy your build hook URL https://api.netlify.com/build_hooks/[id]. Mark the variable as protected.

Gitlab CI Variables

Then update our .gitlab-ci.yml with the following:

stages:
  - deploy

deploy_site:
  stage: deploy
  image: curl
  variables:
    GIT_STRATEGY: none
  script:
    - curl -X POST -d '{}' $NETLIFY_BUILD_WEBHOOK
  only:
    - schedules

This job will run on a schedule, i.e. once a day, that will trigger the build hook and cause Netlify to rebuild our site. This means any posts due to be published that day will be visible on our site.

Finally, let’s schedule our CI job, go to CI/CD > Schedules, and then create a new schedule. Set the cron to whatever you want. My pipeline schedule is set as so:

Gitlab CI Schedule

This will cause our website to build once a day, triggering a build on Netlify. So when the Gitlab CI job runs at midnight on the 23rd of November this post will be visible to you all.

You can test your website using the --buildFuture flag i.e. hugo server -D --buildFuture when testing your site locally.

Appendix

Inspired by

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