Update on Publishing my Emacs Configuration

2022-02-02

509 words, ~4min reading time

After posting my last blog article about publishing my Emacs configuration on Fosstodon, Kaushal Modi (the maintainer of ox-hugo the org mode to hugo exporter that I use for my Blog) wrote me and brought the idea up to publish my Emacs configuration using ox-hugo and hugo. I didn't even think about that and so the same evening I tried it. If you've read my previous blog post you know the amount of code and work that is necessary to get org-publish running, with ox-hugo I need to add the following three lines on top of my config.org file.

#+HUGO_SECTION: config
#+HUGO_BASE_DIR: ~/projects/mmk2410.org/
#+EXPORT_FILE_NAME: index

That's all, you may wonder? Well... I also need to export the file. For me these are the keys: C-e H H (If you're normal that is: CTRL+e followed by H and again followed by H). That's it. Crazy, isn't it! Running hugo serve and navigating to http://localhost:1313/config (yes, you currently (as of 2022-02-02) find this version of the config at mmk2410.org/config, but don't share or save this link as I may or may not remove the page soon, use config.mmk2410.org for this) showed my complete configuration nearly the same as by using org-publish. The only difference is that the slight theme adjustments I made for the org-publish configuration are not there (duh...) and there is no table of contents. But the TOC is another problem anyway since it is in my opinion too large to display directly on the page, as I already wrote in the other post.

The other "next step" I mentioned there was to automatically run the org-publish configuration and publish the new config page after pushing a change. This is also something I need to do with my blog. I currently write blog posts from two different machines and three different operating system installations and remembering to run a git pull via Magit before starting to write is already hard enough for me. Since my hugo publish script only runs hugo to build the site but not Emacs and ox-hugo in advance to export the latest state of the posts I uploaded an incomplete website more than once last month. So either I adjust the script to run some Emacs snippet for running ox-hugo (and including the config export would be easy there) or I go the “DevOps” way and configure a pipeline that runs on every commit, exports the articles, builds the page and publishes it somehow. So the automating task is also something that I need to do anyway.

This puts me in a difficult position: what should I do? On the one hand org-publish approach is very "emacsy" and therefore fits the project of publishing a Emacs configuration really well, on the other hand it is by far easier to use ox-hugo for this. I'm still not sure what to do but I want to decide quite soon since the current workflow of manually publishing two websites slowly starts to annoy me. Especially since I do edits on both quite often.

I'll keep you posted!

Day 9 of the #100DaysToOffload challenge.