How to build your blog use hexo + github

Building a personal blog is simpler than it seems

Introduction

Today, we can't live without th Internet, and we can do a lot of things on it. For example, write something.

Ok, next I will tell you how to build a personal blog that belongs to you, and now it's actually very simple. We will use hexo and github. So I should introduce them to you.

First, let's talk about github. Github is where people build sofware, and more than 40 million people use github ti discover, fork, and contribute to over 100 million projects. Here we will use github to do our blog server.

Next, let's talk about hexo. Hexo is a static blog framework based on Node.js. It has few dependencies and is easy to install and use. It can easily generate static web pages and be hosted on Github and Heroku.

Just do it

Create warehouse

Log in to github first, if you don't have an account then go and register one. Next, create a new warehouse, the name of the warehouse must be like: <github username>.github.io.

Since you need to push files to github, don’t forget to install git. If you are using a Linux or macos system, you may easily install it in the terminal, like:

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sudo apt-get install git

or like:

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sudo pacman -S git

If these do not work, you can find the corresponding command for you system distribution on the Internet.

If you are using windows, then you may need to go to git’s official website to download it.

Configure Hexo

Hexo based on Node.js, so we need to install Node.js. As before, Linux and macos can be easily installed by command, like:

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sudo pacman -S nodejs

Please go to the official website to download, if you are windows.

Don't forget to check after installation.The command aret node -v and npm -v

NPM is a package management tool installed with Node.js, which can solve many problems in Node.js code deployment.Common usage scenarios are as follows:

• allow users to download third-party packages written by others from the NPM server for local use.
• allow users to download and install command line programs written by others from the NPM server for local use.
• allow users to upload their own packages or command line programs to the NPM server for others to use. The new version of Node.js has integrated npm.

After doing this, we can finally start to install hexo, we just use this command:

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sudo npm install -g hexo-cli

This installation takes a long time to wait patiently. When the installation is complete, initialize our blog,this command:

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hexo init blog

Then you will find that there is a blog folder in the current directory, let's go in. It's almost the same here, but we want to deploy to github, so we need to do some configuration. Edit blog/_config.yml, modify like these:

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# Deployment
## Docs: https://hexo.io/docs/deployment.html
deploy:
  type: git
  repo: git@github.com:zlj-zz/zlj-zz.github.io.git
  branch: master

After modifying the configuration file, we install the git deployment plugin to deploy.

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npm install hexo-deployer-git --save

before start:

You need to add sshkey to your github account.

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ssh-keygen -t rsa -C "email"

check it at ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub

start deploy:

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hexo clean
hexo g
hexo d
# or
hexo g -d

If there is no error in executing the command, then the website is deployed. Let's open the browser to visit it, https://<github username>.github.io

Let's look at some common command of hexo.

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npm install hexo -g # install hexo
npm update hexo -g # update hexo
hexo init # initialize

hexo n "your blog" == hexo new "your blog" # new article
hexo g == hexo generate
hexo s == hexo server
hexo d == hexo deploy

Choose theme

We can change the theme of the blog, you can find many themes here and choose to use. The theme I use is hexo-theme-pln.

Download theme like this:

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git clone https://github.com/gaoryrt/hexo-theme-pln.git themes/pln

Edit blog/_config.yml, modify like these to use theme:

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# Extensions
## Plugins: https://hexo.io/plugins/
## Themes: https://hexo.io/themes/
theme: pln