Generate URL cards when building your Hugo site on GitHub Actions

Hugo is known as a super-fast static site generator. It also has many functionaries such as shortcodes. However, it's not good at dynamic processing because it can't use remote files other than JSON or CSV. So we need an API server to generate link cards from URLs.

Although, it's wasteful to use a rental server and I also want to run it locally. Therefore, I decided to create a simple Docker image and use it on GitHub Actions.

Here is the repo for the container.

Generate JSON from Open Graph

Just using otiai10/opengraph.

package main

import (
	"encoding/json"
	"log"
	"net/http"

	"github.com/otiai10/opengraph"
)

func main() {
	http.HandleFunc("/", func(w http.ResponseWriter, r *http.Request) {
		ogp, err := opengraph.Fetch(r.FormValue("url"))
		if err != nil {
			http.Error(w, err.Error(), http.StatusInternalServerError)
		}

		w.Header().Set("Content-Type", "application/json")
		err = json.NewEncoder(w).Encode(ogp)
		if err != nil {
			http.Error(w, err.Error(), http.StatusInternalServerError)
		}
	})

	// Using 0.0.0.0 because cannot access from outside of the container via localhost or 127.0.0.1. Please tell me better solution if you know
	log.Fatal(http.ListenAndServe("0.0.0.0:8080", nil))
}

And build it.

FROM golang:1.17.7-bullseye AS builder

WORKDIR /go/src/ogjson
COPY . .
RUN go install

FROM gcr.io/distroless/base-debian11

COPY --from=builder /go/bin/ogjson /ogjson
CMD ["/ogjson"]

Execute docker run --rm -p 8080:8080 <image>, then you'll be able to get JSON from http://localhost:8080/?url=https://example.com

Use service containers

Service containers are Docker containers that provide a simple and portable way for you to host services that you might need to test or operate your application in a workflow. For example, your workflow might need to run integration tests that require access to a database and memory cache.

We can use containers by just adding the following settings to the manifest file.

jobs:
  # Name of the job
  build:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest

    services:
      # Name of the service
      ogjson:
        # Name of the image on Docker Hub
        image: akimon658/ogjson:1.0.0
        ports:
          - 8080:8080

Create the shortcode

You must create shortcodes under layouts/shortcodes/. The file name will be the shortcode name.

Here is the shortcode I'm using within this blog.

<!-- Get argument and JSON -->
{{ $url := .Get 0 }}
{{ $json := getJSON "http://localhost:8080/?url=" $url }}

<!-- Add target="_blank" when opening external links -->
<a href="{{ $url | safeURL }}"{{ if strings.HasPrefix $url "http" }} target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"{{ end }}>
  <div class="card">
    <div class="card-meta">
      <div class="card-title" title="{{ $json.Title }}">{{ $json.Title }}</div>
      <div class="card-host">{{ $json.URL.Host }}</div>
      <div class="card-description" title="{{ $json.Description }}">{{ $json.Description }}</div>
    </div>
    <!-- Image is an array so use the first one -->
    {{ range first 1 $json.Image }}
      <img src="{{ .URL }}" alt="{{ .Alt }}">
    {{ end }}</div>
</a>

I'm using Title, URL.Host, Description, and Image, but the JSON gives you more information.

Call the shortcode

{{</* card "https://dev.to" */>}}

Here you can see, Hugo successfully generated a URL card!

I think it is also useful to run on dev containers.