2026-01-01

Making a Hugo website, hosted on Codeberg, and pushing to a Web Architects server

I’m involved in starting a housing co-op, and as of today we have a (shitty placeholder) website! 🎉

I wanted to have it hosted by Web Architects because they’re a cool tech co-op doing good things, and also because then I could copy the system that we use over on Corvus Co-op. Jez (who set up the Corvus Co-op website) lent me a hand, and along the way taught me what SSH was, which was a whole lot of fun. I am now unstoppable.

Here’s my notes in case I/you/whoever wants to do the same again. Not all of these are necessary. Note: I’m on Ubuntu 24.04.3 LTS, with many things installed already (git, hugo,…) so if you’re doing this fresh you may need to install bits!

1. Give Web Architects some money

In order to register a domain they’ll ask for various address and ID info, send you and invoice, and do some domain registration stuff in the background. Then they’ll send you some SSH credentials.

2. Set up a codeberg repo, and initialise it with a readme or something like that.

3. Do a local git clone and initialise a Hugo project

Following instructions from: https://gohugo.io/getting-started/quick-start/

• hugo version
  • hugo v0.152.2-6abdacad3f3fe944ea42177844469139e81feda6+extended linux/amd64 BuildDate=2025-10-24T15:31:49Z VendorInfo=snap:0.152.2
• git clone https://codeberg.org/da5nsy/perennialhousingcoop
• cd perennialhousingcoop/
• hugo new site . --force (--force because it is not an empty folder)
• git submodule add https://github.com/theNewDynamic/gohugo-theme-ananke.git themes/ananke
• echo "theme = 'ananke'" >> hugo.toml
• hugo server
  • Open a browser and see a local preview of the site.
• Update hugo.toml with the right title and URL etc.

4. Check your SSH access works

• ssh into WebArch - ssh perennial@webarch1.co.uk
• add a html and check it works - touch index.html
• add some test text - echo "this text" > index.html
• add a copy of the hugo build manually
  • hugo (locally)
  • scp -r /home/danny/Documents/perennialhousingcoop/public/* perennial@webarch1.co.uk:sites/static/

5. (Get a quick primer from Jez on what SSH is)

• public and private parts
• public encrypts, private decrypts
• never share the private part

6. Set up local SSH access to Web Architects so that you don’t have to enter the password every time

• ssh-keygen
• ssh-copy-id perennial@webarch1.co.uk (this copies your computer’s default SSH to webarch)
• ssh 'perennial@webarch1.co.uk' (test it works)

7. Make the website build on Codeberg

• copied https://codeberg.org/corvus-coop/pages-source/src/branch/main/.forgejo/workflows/build.yaml into the repo
• activated actions on the repo (https://codeberg.org/da5nsy/perennialhousingcoop/settings/units)
• did a test git push to get the action to run
  • build successful
  • deploy unsuccessful (as expected, because we haven’t given the Web Architects server any reason to trust this repo yet)
• add variables (https://codeberg.org/da5nsy/perennialhousingcoop/settings/actions/variables)
  • copied from https://codeberg.org/corvus-coop/pages-source/settings/actions/variables, changing Corvus -> Perennial etc.

8. Make the build website get pushed to the Web Arch server.

• generate a new (different SSH key) to give to codeberg (so that WebArch knows to trust this codeberg repo)
  • ssh-keygen
  • “Enter file in which to save the key (/home/danny/.ssh/id_ed25519):” /home/danny/Documents/perennialhousingcoop/id_ed25519
• Add id* to the .gitignore file (so we don’t accidentally commit our secrets)
• awk '{printf "%s\\n", $0}' < id_ed25519 (textual representation of key)
  • copy this into https://codeberg.org/da5nsy/perennialhousingcoop/settings/actions/secrets as DEPLOY-KEY
• from danny@hades:~/Documents/perennialhousingcoop$ ssh-copy-id -i id_ed25519 perennial@webarch1.co.uk (this copies the key which is in the repo, rather than the computer’s default one which also has the same name)

9. Wrapping up

I also needed to enable submodules in the build. Corvus Co-op uses a different way of importing the theme, which maybe longterm is actually better, but I used the hugo reference docs so I’ll stick with that for now.

And just like that… we have a beautiful draft website. Thank you Jez, the Web Arch folks, the Hugo folks, the Codeberg folks, all the other open-source maintainers… you get the idea! 🙌

This post is published under a CC BY 4.0 licence.