Hey guys I was wondering if anyone has tried using ‘Hugo server’ as a preview environment for editors. I know ‘Hugo server’ is primarily a dev server, but I’m thinking since it’s not going to be facing website visitors it might work in this situation.
In my particular case I’m using Contentful. I’ve done a couple sites using Contentful and Hugo which has been a breeze, but for site Previews I’ve basically been maintaining a completely custom preview environment which has created some redundant work on my end.
So I started to become curious if I could just do both environments (production and preview) using Hugo. The idea is the machine running ‘Hugo server’ would receive webhooks from Contentful and run a script that pulls data from the preview API on each webhook. ‘Hugo server’ would then detect the changes and hot-reload the site.
Some potential pitfalls:
I have no idea how resource intensive Hugo server is. At the same time Contentful auto-saves for every single change which will lead to a lot of webhooks being sent to the server. It would result in a lot of changes happening very quickly. I’m not sure what kind of limitations Hugo server has.
What do you guys think? Does anyone have any insight into this?
As in a server that lets editors preview content before hitting publish. Idk maybe preview server is the wrong terminology, but here’s GIF of what I mean.
This is a preview environment I set up for a client’s website. The public facing website is built with Hugo while the environment showing the previews is something I had to make custom. It’s basically a web app but the styling is exactly the same (or mostly the same) as the website.
So I’m basically wondering is instead of doing this if I can run ‘Hugo server’ on a server and have it constantly rebuild the website when new changes are made. At least that’s the idea. It would save me from maintaining two separate environments. I know ‘Hugo server’ was never meant for production, but I thought it could maybe be used on a ‘live environment’ in this case.
I presumed most folks used the built-in dev server to preview their sites locally, on their PCs. That’s what I do. Cheers.
Yes I’m aware of previewing locally I run Hugo server all the time when I develop. This is mainly so that editors can immediately preview from the CMS without generating a full rebuild.
I guess I was mainly concerned about the potential server resources needed if Hugo server is getting a webhook to rebuild every second or even several times a second.
Contentful autosaves as you type and it sends a webhook for each autosave. I was thinking if an editor is typing, or even say 3 editors are typing on different articles it could really tax the server since it’ll be triggering a ton of rebuilds. I just realize maybe I could create a filter or something where it’ll only rebuild once every 5 seconds or something. That could be the solution.
So I actually reached out to Contentful and found out that the webhook for auto-saves only fires every 20 seconds, even though it auto-saves immediately. So I think this will actually work out . I’m going to experiment with this and post my results later.
. I’m going to experiment with this and post my results later.