denmette.github.io

Personal blog for Maarten Casteels at https://casteels.dev, built with Hugo and a custom theme.

Stack

• Hugo (site generation)
• Tailwind CSS + PostCSS (styling)
• Pagefind (static search index)
• AWS S3 + CloudFront + Route53 (hosting)
• Terraform (infrastructure as code)

Local development

Requirements:

• Hugo (extended)
• Node.js + npm

Common commands:

npm install
npm run dev

What it does:

• Builds the CSS once, then keeps Tailwind/PostCSS watching for changes
• Builds the site (including drafts and future posts)
• Runs Pagefind on public/
• Starts the Hugo dev server

Important:

• hugo server alone does not rebuild static/css/main.css.
• For template or Tailwind changes, use npm run dev or run npm run build:css manually.

Build

npm run build

Outputs the site to public/ and generates the Pagefind index.

To preview the IndexNow payload from the current sitemap:

npm run build
npm run indexnow:dry-run

Content structure

• content/ - posts and pages
• layouts/ - custom layouts/shortcodes
• themes/custom/ - theme source
• static/ - static assets copied to the site
• resources/ - Hugo pipeline cache/artifacts

Post convention

• Blog posts under content/posts/... should use cover.webp as the hero image.
• Preferred cover size is 2400x1260.
• New posts created with hugo new posts/... use archetypes/posts.md, which includes the standard cover front matter.

Infrastructure

Terraform lives in infra/ and manages:

• S3 buckets: casteels.dev and www.casteels.dev
• CloudFront distributions (main + www redirect)
• ACM certs (us-east-1) and Route53 records
• Security headers (CSP, HSTS, etc.)

Typical workflow:

terraform -chdir=infra init
terraform -chdir=infra plan
terraform -chdir=infra apply

Notes:

• Backend state is stored in s3://casteels-dev-terraform-state-bucket/hugo-site/terraform.tfstate.
• AWS credentials are required for eu-west-1 and us-east-1.
• CSP allowlists are defined in infra/cloudfront.tf (fonts, analytics, comments, etc.). If a browser reports CSP violations, add the required domains to the relevant csp_*_allow list.

IndexNow

• The site hosts its IndexNow key at /a9396471fd0ec31f789c1992bb07f313.txt.
• The first deploy after the key goes live submits the full sitemap to IndexNow.
• The deploy workflow compares the live sitemap with the freshly built public/sitemap.xml.
• After the S3 sync, it submits added, updated, and removed URLs to the IndexNow global endpoint.

Comments

Comments are handled via utteranc.es linked to denmette/denmette.github.io (see hugo.toml).