I host this site at Render.com. Specifically, I use Render’s Static Site product. It’s a good product and free for most usage. It features an auto-configured SSL certificate, global CDN, pull request previews, and many other nice things. I’m also paying Render to host some Elixir things and enjoy the simplicity of fewer things to manage

When you read the docs, Render provides instructions on what to do if you are using Hugo to build your static site. Unfortunately, their version of Hugo is locked and a bit dated as I type this. (I observed version 0.124.0 when the current version of Hugo is 1.46.5.) Some other static allow you to set a HUGO_VERSION environment variable, but sadly Render does not support this.

Render allows you to supply a custom build command, and I’ve taken the opportunity to install an updated version of Hugo per deployment so I can keep it current. Here is the script and some other notes to keep in mind.

Using a custom build command

You can read more official docs about the build command, but in short, you set it up in the Settings for your site. Instead of a single command, you can point it to a build shell script from your project’s repo.

My build script looks like this:

#!/usr/bin/env bash

# This script is used by Render to build the app for production deployment.

# set up an exit on error
set -o errexit

# Save the initial directory
ORIGINAL_DIR="$PWD"

# Install npm dependencies
echo "Installing npm dependencies..."
npm install --verbose

# Install specific version of Hugo
HUGO_VERSION="0.145.0"  # Change this to your required version
echo "Installing Hugo ${HUGO_VERSION}..."

# Create directory for Hugo download and installation
mkdir -p "${HOME}/bin"
mkdir -p /tmp/hugo
cd /tmp/hugo

# Download and install specific Hugo version
wget -q https://github.com/gohugoio/hugo/releases/download/v${HUGO_VERSION}/hugo_extended_${HUGO_VERSION}_Linux-64bit.tar.gz
tar -xzf hugo_extended_${HUGO_VERSION}_Linux-64bit.tar.gz

# Move Hugo to a directory you have permission for
mv hugo "${HOME}/bin/"

# Add the bin directory to PATH
export PATH="${HOME}/bin:${PATH}"

# Verify installation
hugo version

# Return to project directory
cd "$ORIGINAL_DIR"

# Now you can add your Hugo build commands here
hugo --logLevel info

In addition to installing Hugo, I also install some npm packages, including Tailwind and the Tailwind Typography plugin, which I am using for my Hugo template HTML. One thing to keep in mind here is that Render does honor and expect a NODE_VERSION inside your environment settings to hint what version of node to use. This static site was defaulting to a pretty old version of node when I started without a NODE_VERSION environment variable, and that seems to be based on when the static site service was initialized.

I do a bit of extra logging to help me debug, but overall, this script is pretty straightforward. Make sure to grant execution permissions with chmod a+x build.sh to the shell script when composing it.

Inefficiencies

Installing Hugo (and node things) for every deployment is excessive and will be charged against my pipeline minutes, but for the simple needs of this site, which is published a few times a month I doubt it will add up to anything much. If you want to optimize this, consider Dockerizing the deployment and perhaps even assembling the static content in a continuous integration system like GitHub Actions. (I was planning on that at first, but this build command approach was more straightforward for now.)