I have a list of scheduled posts that I want to publish every week on my blog, and I try to stay a few days ahead of that queue to have room for when I’m unable to write, or if I want to take a break.
I find consistency is very important to keep the momentum going for my work. Since two months I post every day from Monday to Saturday, and I want to do so in the future as well, as I really like doing it.
I use the Hugo Static Site Generator, hosted on Netlify.
It’s an amazing combination of tools, and I’m very happy with the blog setup.
Today I was out hiking on a mountain when I realized I got past my usual posting time, and I didn’t publish the blog post I already scheduled.
With Hugo I can set a post date in the future, and when the site is rebuilt using the hugo CLI command, that post is not included in the resulting HTML, as it’s a future post.
Netlify has this nice concept of building the Hugo site on their servers, so what I need to do is just trigger a new deploy. Usually deploys happen when I push something to GitHub - Netlify is alerted automatically and deploys in a minute or less.
In this case I needed to manually trigger a deploy on Netlify so I logged in using my iPhone, and clicked “Trigger deploy”.
This action rebuilt the static site using Hugo, on the server side, and I just put my phone back in the pocket.
The blog post launched 🎉 and I just tweeted about it.
As I was walking, I realized I can automate all this stuff.
I just need to trigger a deploy automatically every day at 9AM, somehow. So I looked on the Netlify interface if they had any kind of automated timer for recurring deploys. There is no such feature, however they have a WebHook endpoint.
So I looked for something that I can configure to POST to the WebHook every day. Enter Zapier.
Zapier is a tool that’s all about automation.
Googling around I found a Zap to send a WebHook POST request on a daily schedule, and that’s exactly what I needed.
Now, on Netlify I just created a WebHook URL
which gave me a custom URL to call:
I just pasted the URL on Zapier, and set it up to make an empty POST request to my Netlify hook:
and the testing manually-triggered Zap deploy worked:
I’m happy now! I just have to create content, push it to GitHub with the scheduled date, and don’t worry about deploying any more! 🌈 🎉 👨🏼💻