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’s 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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``yaml -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 😩
-To deploy, I needed SSH access to the server. Gitea doesn’t have built-in secrets management (like GitHub Actions), so I had to hardcode my SSH private key inside the workflow.
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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? 🤔
-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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