Recently, I tried setting up Gitea Actions to automatically update my Hugo blog whenever I pushed new content. The idea was simple:

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  • Use Gitea鈥檚 built-in CI/CD to pull the repo,
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  • Build the site using Hugo,
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  • Deploy it to the server.
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Setting Up Gitea Actions

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First, I created a .gitea/workflows/deploy.yml file with the following steps:

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name: Deploy Hugo Site
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+on:
+  push:
+    branches:
+      - main
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+jobs:
+  build:
+    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
+    steps:
+      - name: Clone repository
+        uses: actions/checkout@v3
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+      - name: Install Hugo
+        run: |
+          sudo apt update && sudo apt install -y hugo
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+      - name: Build site
+        run: hugo -D
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+      - name: Deploy to server
+        run: |
+          scp -r public/* user@server:/var/www/html/
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Authentication Issues 馃槱

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To deploy, I needed SSH access to the server. Gitea doesn鈥檛 have built-in secrets management (like GitHub Actions), so I had to hardcode my SSH private key inside the workflow.

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My SSH Key

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I knew this wasn’t ideal, but I just wanted to get it working first. Unfortunately, after multiple attempts, it still failed with permission denied (publickey) errors.

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What’s Next? 馃

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Instead of fighting with Gitea Actions, I decided to try something else. In my next post, I’ll explain how I switched to a simpler, more reliable approach using a sync service.

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