Entries this day: how-netlify-helped-me-fix-my-website

how netlify helped me fix my website

My website stopped working recently. More accurately, Hugo stopped rendering the /blog and /journal portions of my website. The last time it worked was 2 weeks ago. I noticed that my local version of Hugo had gotten updated (*) and checked the releases.. sure enough there was a change to something related to that I had tweaked regarding indices.

The problem languished for a while until I remembered that [Netlify allows choosing which version of Hugo to use](https://www.netlify.com/blog/2017/04/11/netlify-plus-hugo-0.20-and-beyond/).

That, along with building every branch, allowed me to test at exactly which version of Hugo my site stopped being rendered properly.

I had already created a mini version of my site, so I whipped up a shell script netlify.shto slap a bunch of different branches with different versions of Hugo requested.

#!/usr/bin/env bash

VERSION=$1
BRANCH=hugo${VERSION//\./}
FILE=netlify.toml

echo "version $VERSION"
echo "branch $BRANCH"

git checkout master
git branch -f $BRANCH
sleep 1
git checkout $BRANCH

sed -i '' s/"0.54.0"/"$VERSION"/g $FILE

git add $FILE

sleep 1

git commit -m "Hugo $VERSION

to narrow down when it stopped working"

sleep 1

git push origin $BRANCH

sleep 1

git log --oneline --graph --decorate --all

The sleep commands are there to keep git from locking itself out of the directory.

This allowed me to run

./netlify.sh 0.45

where 0.45 is a version number I wanted to test.

I thereby created a bunch of branches...

* 77836e3 (origin/hugo0471, hugo0471) Hugo 0.47.1
| * 1254cd2 (origin/hugo047, hugo047) Hugo 0.47
|/
| * 41014f0 (origin/hugo046, hugo046) Hugo 0.46
|/
| * cb8b953 (origin/hugo0451, hugo0451) Hugo 0.45.1
|/
| * ee47137 (origin/hugo0422, hugo0422) Hugo 0.42.2
|/
| * df2c69f (origin/hugo0403, hugo0403) Hugo 0.40.3
|/
| * ea775d5 (origin/hugo039, hugo039) Hugo 0.39
|/
| * 1caa175 (origin/hugo0382, hugo0382) Hugo 0.38.2
|/
| * a826419 (origin/hugo038, hugo038) Hugo 0.38
|/
| * 2b4b63c (origin/hugo0371, hugo0371) Hugo 0.37.1
|/
| * c69e973 (origin/hugo037, hugo037) Hugo 0.37
|/
| * 01c68bf (origin/hugo0361, hugo0361) Hugo 0.36.1
|/
| * 609b6c4 (origin/hugo036, hugo036) Hugo 0.36
|/
| * c885d55 (origin/hugo040, hugo040) Hugo 0.40
|/
| * a8e7ea5 (origin/hugo041, hugo041) Hugo 0.41
|/
| * b0a8b51 (origin/hugo042, hugo042) Hugo 0.42
|/
| * d1710b2 (origin/hugo043, hugo043) Hugo 0.43
|/
| * d3d75d0 (origin/hugo044, hugo044) Hugo 0.44
|/
| * 522256c (origin/hugo045, hugo045) Hugo 0.45
|/
* 3b956b6 (HEAD -> master, origin/master) Use baseurl = "/" for running on Netlify
* e77f687 Simplify debugging by removing ghost files
* e11a45e Pared down site from https://github.com/thunderrabbit/journal-hugo

And Netlify quickly created all of them so I could figure out which ones worked and which ones did not.

• https://hugo046--angry-lumiere-228f57.netlify.com
• https://hugo045--angry-lumiere-228f57.netlify.com
• https://hugo044--angry-lumiere-228f57.netlify.com
• https://hugo043--angry-lumiere-228f57.netlify.com
• https://hugo042--angry-lumiere-228f57.netlify.com

etc etc

None of them worked!

(☉_☉)

(*) The fact that the local version had gotten updated automagically should have been a clue that the auto-updating Hugo had not caused the problem. I had no idea when the updates happened, but the problem suddenly started, and I assumed an update was the cause.

"Well, boys, I was wrong."

it was my mistake all along

In an attempt to fix my top page, I had tweaked this and that, where this and that are the main repo site, and sub-module theme, respectively. During the process, I did not notice that I had also broken the entire site. Part of the not noticing was due to the current way I have Hugo set up, it does not wipe the output public/ directory before creating the site. (Although I intended to and thought I had activated that option.)

here's where it gets tricky. My current site consists of multiple submodules, the two mentioned above, a couple others which have not changed in months (years), and my journal entries, which currently has 8500+ files. There are enough journal files that when I try to run Hugo on my site locally, it crashes with too many files open. I cannot let Hugo watch for changes so I have to restart Hugo each time I make a change.

Let's see if I can offload that task to Netlify.

Basic idea:

1. Start with my local website repository
2. Wipe all files from the public/ directory
3. Copy the remaining files to a new directory
4. git checkout abcdef123 --recurse-submodules
5. Create a branch
6. Push to Netlify

or

1. Wipe most of the journal entries
2. Run the code locally

12:56 Wednesday 25 September 2019 JST

Getting closer. I made a script I called commitlify.sh

#!/usr/bin/env bash

COMMIT=$1
BRANCH=hugo_${COMMIT//\./}

echo "commit $COMMIT"
echo "branch $BRANCH"

rm -rf public/

ls public/

git checkout $COMMIT --recurse-submodules

git branch -f $BRANCH

sleep 1

git checkout $BRANCH

sleep 1

git push origin $BRANCH

sleep 1

hugo server -w=0

It does a similar thing as the previous script, but deals with submodules being aligned with the main repo's HEAD. The last line tells Hugo to serve the site, but not to monitor it for changes.

This is fine for now because I am just poking around to see which commits were breaking commits.

21:58

I found a breaking commit that used to be a genius commit, but apparently its genius did not survive changes in Hugo.

00:32 Thursday 26 September 2019 JST

And now I have gotten enough of the errors out of the system that I can get Netlify to build something with the repo. I still do not have /blog nor /journal indices working, but getting closer. There were a couple of commits that did work, so .. oh I can try one now.

Dangit. There are different errors with some commits I marked as working in my local setup.

Too tired to work on it now. good night!

22:20 Thursday 26 September 2019 JST

Yayyy!! As of today, I got an old version of my site working on Netlify.

Both the journal and blog have their own pages, and the top page shows just the blog entries.

The pagination on the top page is messed up, but now that I have something working, I can ask peeps on the Hugo forum for help on that. My attempt to fix that is what broke my site in the first place.

Okay.. now to get my journal entries and blog entries up to date!

Go to main repo directory

cd ~/journal-hugo

Keep track of the old master branch

git branch -f old_master c670763

Move the master branch to the branch that is working now (bbfbe552a5a6f8b9337af3ac41ee359250a309df)

git branch -f master

It took 45 minutes to deploy before, so this may be up in 45 minutes. https://new-robnugen-com-fallible-abandoned-58f942.netlify.com

Oh dang, I triggered a deploy by uploading my latest journal without uploading this latest change.