A Sample Makefile for Publishing Blog Articles

As some readers may already know, this site has been running on a static site generator since late 2014/early 2015, when I migrated from WordPress to Jekyll on GitHub Pages. I’ve since migrated again, this time to Hugo on S3/CloudFront. Along the way, I’ve taken an interest in using make and a Makefile to help automate certain tasks at the CLI. In this post, I’ll share how I’m using a Makefile to help with publishing blog articles.

If you’re not familiar with make or its use of a Makefile, have a look at this article I wrote on using a Makefile with Markdown documents, then come back here.

In general, the process for publishing a blog post using Hugo and S3/CloudFront basically looks like this:

1. Write the blog post. (I haven’t found a tool to automate this yet!)
2. Put the blog post into the right section of the Hugo directory tree. (In my setup, it’s in the content/post directory.)
3. Build the static site using hugo.
4. Upload the resulting HTML files to the appropriate S3 bucket.
5. Invalidate the appropriate URLs (paths) in AWS CloudFront so that the CDN picks up the new files/pages.

Some of these steps are easy to automate; what I’ve tackled with make and a Makefile are steps 3, 4, and 5. Here’s the current version of the Makefile I’m using (with a few randomizations to protect some of my information):

SRC_DIR := public/
CF_DIST := ABCDEFG1234567
BUCKET := my-destination-bucket

build:
    @hugo

upload:
    @s3deploy -source=$(SRC_DIR) -region=us-east-1 -bucket=$(BUCKET)

invalidate:
    @aws cloudfront create-invalidation --distribution $(CF_DIST) \
    --paths / /archives/ /categories/ /feed.xml

deploy: build upload invalidate

server:
    -@hugo server

clean:
    @rm -rf $(SRC_DIR)

With this Makefile in place, my process for publishing looks like this:

1. Write the blog post in Markdown.
2. Move the blog post’s Markdown file into the appropriate directory (in my case, content/post).
3. Run make build to verify that the site builds correctly. If it runs into errors, fix the errors and repeat until the site builds correctly.
4. Run make deploy. This will build the site (which I’ve verified will build correctly in the previous step), upload the files to S3 using s3deploy, and then invalidate a few paths. Done!

In earlier versions of the Makefile, I didn’t have all the different targets (“build”, “upload”, and “invalidate”) broken out, but after working with this approach for a while it made more sense to me to split out the steps, then list them as dependencies in a final “deploy” target. So far, this approach has worked out pretty well.

One thing I haven’t quite worked out yet is the “server” target, which simply runs hugo server (for serving up a local version of the site). The hyphen at the front of this command tells make to ignore errors returned by the command it runs (so that it will ignore the error produced when I press Ctrl-C to stop Hugo), but this doesn’t work so well. If anyone has any suggestions to work around this, I’m open to hearing them (hit me on Twitter).

In any case, in the event any readers out there are considering the use of a static site generator, I hope this information on helping to streamline and automate the process of publishing a post using a Makefile proves helpful.

Metadata and Navigation