We begin with staring at my ESXI Host on my Intel NUC. I currently only have 2 VM’s running with minor capacity and usage so plenty of horsepower to spare.

(I lied, Step 0 way buying a domain!)

First we download the relevant ISO (Ubuntu Server LTS) and upload that to our ISO storage on ESXI.

Next we actually create a VM! I went with 1gb of RAM and 1 CPU Core since this is going to be doing nothing but storing code and pushing things to Github/Running Hugo.

Follow the prompts for installing Ubuntu as needed until the VM reboots.

First thing first, “sudu apt update & apt upgrade -y” to update and upgrade in one go. Install any non-important things now. (Screenfetch!)

Now we install Hugo by “sudo apt install Hugo” and let that do it’s thing. Once we have Hugo we’re nearly ready to start writing.

Enter “hugo site new” in the command line to generate a new static site! (WARNING! Be sure to have yourself CD’d to where you want to store your data!!!)

Once you have your new site, we can CD into it and see some files it’s generated. Here is our stopping point for interacting directly with the VM.

From here you have the option of using your IDE of choice, I went with VSCode along with an SSH Extension so I connect to the VM directly and edit it all here.

So now we have a code editor, a “site” and some files. The heck do we do with that? Github! Made a seperate repisotory and pushed it all there for storage.

Then I linked it up to Cloudflare Pages to handle auto-building of the site. Once this is all synced up we get a pretty nice workflow.

1. Edit in VSCode to make whatever you want
2. Push all of that to Github
3. Cloudflare kicks in and renders your site!

This isn’t my best write-up but I have to start somewhere.