A personal website that allows me to post on various things in my research and personal experience.
Developed using the Stack theme from Hugo.
I create new branches for each new post so as to explore different ideas/drafts for my work. It also helps me see what articles I haven't worked on in a hot minute and if I need to come back to any of them.
This extra step, of creating a whole new branch, comes with plenty of risks if you don't do it right, and so today I am documenting my workflow so that I can remember what steps I need to take to avoid issues I've had in the past.
The default branch is the main branch. This is where all things get published and are viewable for the public. It has the follwoing processes run whenever it gets updated:
- Build site
- Deploy site
There are two ways that I can edit this branch, both involving a pull request:
- New posts through the
postsbranch - Site-wide development through the
devbranch
At any given time, these three branches will ideally be all in sync. Both of these branches are also used to run the "build site" step up above. Only if the build process succeeds would I then merge the branch into main.
When I write new posts, I start by branching off of the posts branch and create a new posts_<article_label> branch. On this branch, I go through the process of writing new content and making sure that it will function just right through Hugo's command line interface.
When I commit content in these branches, I ONLY COMMIT FILES IN THE content/post FOLDER. Any time that I run hugo server in the command line, other files in the public/ folder will also be changed, but I do not need to save these within the branch; they are automatically generated, and when the content reaches the main branch, the correct files will be built by the system. If I am using an IDE like VSCode, I can just revert all the changes for the files in the public/ folder, since these changes don't need to be tracked through the posts and main branches.
Any time that I want to add a new feature, like comments or links, this goes through the dev branch. Again, it builds any changes upon push to make sure that they won't break, checking to see if something went wrong. If all the changes look right when I hugo server this branch and it builds on GitHub, then I can merge these changes into main, being sure to then pass them into the posts branch for later posts to follow through as well.