One of the things that I wanted to be able to do was setup a full CI/CD pipeline for my blog. As someone once said If it’s worth doing, it’s worth overdoing and it was in that spirit I configured Azure DevOps to deploy Hexo.

First off a short intro to Azure DevOps. Previously known as Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS) it is a service that allows you to manage code repositories, boards, pipelines (which we’ll cover here) and even test plans. You can also use Azure Pipelines with GitHub and while I did not do that here because I wanted all my repos to be private, there is no reason you cannot use GitHub as your source repo. Especially since two weeks ago they announced free private repos.

I had initially intended to publish this as part of my Azure DevOps entry, but it felt like it needed its own dedicated article. For my Hexo workflow I decided I wanted to use the Windows Subsystem for Linux from here on referred to as WSL. This works best for me because I am primarily a Windows user and I also have a fair bit of experience with Linux. Getting Started The first thing you’ll need to do is get Hexo configured locally so that you can generate the static content for later deployment, and also run your local server to test your content.

When the time came to relaunch my blog I spent a fair amount of time researching options. I wanted something that worked well for me that didn’t require too much infrastructure. I also wanted to keep costs fairly low and not take on a large monthly recurring cost.

• Ideally, I wanted static content that I could host in an Azure Storage account or some sort of static website hosting.
• I wanted something that felt comfortable for me. I spend a fair amount of time authoring articles in Markdown and it has really grown on me over the past few years.
• An application with a fair amount of plugin and theme options, I don’t really want to get involved in creating a custom template. A reasonably sized community was a plus.