• taken cloudron surfer as base app
• tweaked Dockerfile to install hugo (into /app/data as suggested)
• added a deploy.sh script for manual publishing (not via cron)

Installed it as a custom app.
Works nicely (as of course it should)
Need to tidy it up before publishing a repo.

So now I have Hugo bundled with Surfer, so all coding & building can be done within the container/app deployment.
No need for CI/CD, and no need for git commits / push / fetch etc.
Just open up the terminal from the app's settings panel.
Single 'source of truth' accessible from any device.

It might be a niche use case, but if someone really wants hugo deployed on Cloudron, it's available.

• Install surfer
• Install hugo into /app/data of surfer - https://gohugo.io/installation/linux/
• Then, setup a cron script via https://docs.cloudron.io/apps/#cron . That cron script periodically checks for changes in upstream, builds it locally and copies over to the surfer directory.

To be fair, this is what we did with GitHub Pages app . It runs jekyll and accepts git pushes (but only via http)

But there’s an element to the discussion missing. In my case, I don’t want to be building locally. Then I am tied to a specific local device. It may not be to hand (and maybe too lazy to levitate posterior from sofa).

Yes, I could sync local configs between devices, but that’s not always smooth.

I would prefer to use a cloud resource to build and publish. If I am working in the terminal locally, no different to working in terminal remotely.
Yes, I could setup a remote deployment of a Linux desktop, use that to build and publish to eg Surfer. But why the duplication ? Seems more elegant and contained to be able to do it in one place.

I know this is contrary to the CI/CD bandwagon. But I see a lot of advantages, principally avoiding multiple component pieces.

“document the problem away”

Yes, I think this is probably the answer. If there was a good step by step guide for beginners as to how to get started with this static site stuff then people could just do it.

What I want is a nice self-hosted documentation site that people can "click to edit this page on GitLab/ Gitea/ Gogs" like lots of people already do GitHub pages and Github. or with Gitbook.

The impression I get is that this really shouldn't be that hard to do using Surfer together with one of the Git apps on Cloudron (and/ or GitHub Pages), but I'm still not really sure where to start

Perhaps I should spend less time on this forum and more time reading up about it all! Then I could help write the guide! that might happen eventually!

From the shell we can pipe tar - over the network which could be as simple as that.

I have now setup a ci flow with Drone (managing app running on Cloudron as well, agents running elsewhere). Only downside is that the surfer cli is quite slow for lots of small files, uploading my page currently takes 15 minutes.