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Unikraft Cloud

Deploy Static Content with Hugo

This guide shows you how to use Hugo, a high performance webserver, with the ananke theme.

To run it, follow these steps:

  1. Install the kraft CLI tool and a container runtime engine, e.g. Docker.

  2. Clone the examples repository and cd into the examples/hugo/ directory:

Terminal window
git clone https://github.com/kraftcloud/examples
cd examples/hugo/

Make sure to log into Unikraft Cloud by setting your token and a metro close to you. We use fra0 (Frankfurt, 🇩🇪) in this guide:

Terminal window
# Set Unikraft Cloud access token
export UKC_TOKEN=token
# Set metro to Frankfurt, DE
export UKC_METRO=fra0

When done, invoke the following command to deploy this application on Unikraft Cloud:

Terminal window
kraft cloud deploy -p 443:1313 -M 512 .

The output shows the instance URL and other details:

Terminal window
[●] Deployed successfully!
 │
 ├────────── name: hugo-zpabu
 ├────────── uuid: dfc6e06c-76cc-4aa1-a053-c4eded0d2456
 ├───────── state: running
 ├─────────── url: https://morning-rain-jikpfy3t.fra0.kraft.host
 ├───────── image: hugo@sha256:68d20fdb707076b1cd0f2848b17cc75670d8a92b740edb9417aeb8463fef7f19
 ├───── boot time: 77.17 ms
 ├──────── memory: 512 MiB
 ├─────── service: morning-rain-jikpfy3t
 ├── private fqdn: hugo-zpabu.internal
 ├──── private ip: 172.16.6.4
 └────────── args: /usr/bin/hugo server --bind=0.0.0.0 --source /site

In this case, the instance name is hugo-zpabu and the URL is https://morning-rain-jikpfy3t.fra0.kraft.host. They are different for each run.

Use curl to query the Unikraft Cloud instance of Hugo.

Terminal window
curl https://morning-rain-jikpfy3t.fra0.kraft.host
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en-us">
  <head><script src="/livereload.js?mindelay=10&amp;v=2&amp;port=1313&amp;path=livereload" data-no-instant defer></script>
    <meta charset="utf-8">
    <meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=edge,chrome=1">
[...]

At any point in time, you can list information about the instance:

Terminal window
kraft cloud instance list
NAME           FQDN                               STATE    CREATED AT     IMAGE                                                 MEMORY     ARGS                                 BOOT TIME
hugo-zpabu     morning-rain-jikpfy3t.fra0.kra...  running  1 minute ago   hugo@sha256:68d20fdb707076b1cd0f2848b17cc75670d8a...  512 MiB    /usr/bin/hugo server --bind=...      77166us

When done, you can remove the instance:

Terminal window
kraft cloud instance remove hugo-zpabu

Customize your Application

To customize the Hugo application, update the files in the repository, listed below:

  • Kraftfile: the Unikraft Cloud specification
  • site/: sample site content
  • Dockerfile: In case you need to add files to your instance’s rootfs
spec: v0.6


runtime: hugo:latest


rootfs: ./Dockerfile


cmd: ["/usr/bin/hugo", "server", "--bind=0.0.0.0", "--source", "/site"]

Update the contents of the site/ directory to serve different static web content.

After re-deploying the Hugo image on Unikraft Cloud, using curl or a browser to query it will present the new page contents.

The static web content located in the site/ can of course be generated offline by tools like Jekyll or Hugo.

Learn More

Use the --help option for detailed information on using Unikraft Cloud:

Terminal window
kraft cloud --help

Or visit the CLI Reference.