Migrating from ghost to hugo

I’ve been happily running a VPS on DigitalOcean for over 3 years and last year I started running iamjonfry.com using the Ghost blogging platform. Over the weekend I decided to upgrade to Ghost to the latest version, v0.9.0, however I ran into quite a few issues during the upgrade process (spoiler alert node package manager - npm).

I first updated to the latest supported version of node.js 4.4.7, and NPM 3.10.5. After downloading and extracting the ghost zip, running

npm-install --production

would mysteriously end with

Killed

After a bit of research (google) I came across others who had experienced the same thing here and here. It turns out that my droplet was OOM(out of memory) whilst attempting to install the dependencies.

You need more ram - helpful

A temporary fix to this (aka hack) is to create a swap file to be used when the system runs out of memory. I followed a tutorial here and it worked as expected allowing me to install the dependencies. However, this annoyed me as I really can’t justify having to create a swap file to install dependencies for something as simple as a blog. Plus, watching NPM download half the internet as dependencies was the last straw and motivated me to find a ‘better’ option. *The work that is done on Ghost is excellent and I don’t want to detract in any way from what they are doing.

After some research on static site generators, of which there are many, I came across hugo which is a static site generator written in Go. As I am fond of Go and always looking to tinker with it, it seemed like a great fit.

From zero-to-blog is as easy as installing hugo with brew

brew install hugo

Cloning a theme (in my case the simple but delightful hugo-lithium-theme)

git clone https://github.com/jrutheiser/hugo-lithium-theme

and running it

hugo server

As ghost posts are written in markdown, and hugo also uses markdown, migration of my old blog posts was as easy as copying the files over. I don’t have any complex tags or setup with ghost so your milage may vary. Whilst moving my blog to using hugo I decided to also move to using AWS instead of DigitalOcean. This was primarily driven by learning as I wanted to experiment with deploying something live to AWS (I still maintain my DigitalOcean droplet).

I intend to write up a follow-up blog post to this showing how I deployed my website to S3 on AWS, and used wercker to automate the deploy process with GitHub.

You can find the source for this blog hosted on GitHub.