Introduction🔗

After some time without a personal blog, I decided to write down what I have learned and used. This site is mainly a personal collection of tasks, tools, and setups that I use regularly.

Over the years I tried plain text, plain HTML, and several CMS and frameworks such as WordPress, Django, Gatsby, and Hugo. For some company websites, I still use a CMS because many business users are not comfortable with Git and text editors, and a CMS offers a more user-friendly interface.

For my personal site, I chose Zola because I wanted a Rust-based static site generator. When I checked Jamstack Site Generators, I found a few Rust options 🦀 and picked Zola.

Why GitLab Pages?🔗

These days, hosting a static site for free is straightforward. Many version control systems offer a Pages feature, including GitLab Pages. Why GitLab and not GitHub, Codeberg, or something else? Because I already had a GitLab account and I like the platform.

What do I publish?🔗

After choosing the tooling, the next question was content. There are already many blogs out there 🤭 on almost every topic, and more people now use AI to get answers quickly.

My honest answer is: “for my own laziness” 🤓.

I had knowledge spread across multiple places, so I kept searching for where command X or Y was documented. This blog is my way to keep that knowledge in one place that I can access from anywhere.

Summary🔗

So far, the setup looks like this:

• Tool: zola
• Hosting: GitLab Pages
• Content: Notes for myself, and hopefully useful for others too

Let’s start writing🔗

zola🔗

The Zola docs begin with an overview and the core commands:

zola init none-blog
cd none-blog
git remote add origin https://gitlab.com/aleks001/none-blog.git
# original theme before March 2026
# git submodule add https://codeberg.org/salif/linkita.git themes/linkita
git submodule add https://github.com/thomasweitzel/zolarwind.git themes/zolarwind

The last command adds the Zolarwind theme.

Update (March 2026): I moved from Linkita to Zolarwind because I preferred the design.
The commented command above reflects my original setup when I first published this post.

After that, I could start writing. You can find my blog posts here and the list will keep growing.

The site config is here.

Create Content🔗

Based on what I learned from analytics tools, I always include front matter like this:

+++
title='How to host a Zola-generated site on GitLab Pages'
description='How to host a Zola-generated site on GitLab Pages'
updated=2025-08-26
date=2025-08-26

[taxonomies]
categories= ["zola","gitlab"]
tags= ["zola", "gitlab", "rust"]
+++

Then I just create Markdown files and write.

GitLab Pages🔗

To use GitLab Pages, you need a GitLab account and a repository. This is mine for this blog: https://gitlab.com/aleks001/none-blog/.

Zola provides a GitLab Pages deployment guide. I adapted my .gitlab-ci.yml based on that guide. I also added a compression step so content is served compressed to browsers, which saves bandwidth.

This is my .gitlab-ci.yml:

stages:
  - build
  - deploy

default:
  image: debian:stable-slim

variables:
  # Fetch theme submodules automatically.
  GIT_SUBMODULE_STRATEGY: "recursive"

  # Keep CI on the same major/minor Zola as local development.
  ZOLA_VERSION: "0.22.1"

  SITE_BASE_URL: "https://blog.none.at"
  COMPRESS_REGEX: ".*\\.(htm|html|xml|txt|text|js|css|svg)$"

pages-build:
  stage: build
  script:
    - |
      apt-get update
      DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive apt-get install --assume-yes --no-install-recommends wget ca-certificates
      ZOLA_RELEASE_DIR="https://github.com/getzola/zola/releases/download/v${ZOLA_VERSION}"
      ZOLA_TARBALL="zola-v${ZOLA_VERSION}-x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu.tar.gz"
      echo "******************************************************"
      echo "*"
      echo "* Using zola version: ${ZOLA_VERSION}"
      echo "* Retrieving zola tarball: ${ZOLA_TARBALL}"
      echo "* ..from: ${ZOLA_RELEASE_DIR}"
      echo "*"
      echo "******************************************************"
      wget --no-verbose "${ZOLA_RELEASE_DIR}/${ZOLA_TARBALL}"
      tar -xzf "${ZOLA_TARBALL}"
      ./zola build --base-url "${SITE_BASE_URL}" --minify
  artifacts:
    paths:
      - public
    expire_in: 1 week

pages:
  stage: deploy
  pages: true
  dependencies:
    - pages-build
  script:
    - |
      echo "Deploy pages built in previous stage"
      apt-get update
      DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive apt-get install --assume-yes --no-install-recommends brotli zstd
      find public -type f -regex "${COMPRESS_REGEX}" -exec gzip -f -k {} \;
      find public -type f -regex "${COMPRESS_REGEX}" -exec brotli -f -k {} \;
      find public -type f -regex "${COMPRESS_REGEX}" -exec zstd -f -k {} \;
  artifacts:
    paths:
      - public
    expire_in: 1 week
  rules:
    - if: $CI_COMMIT_BRANCH == $CI_DEFAULT_BRANCH

Custom domains🔗

Because GitLab Pages supports custom domains, I configured the blog subdomain for none.at. That gives me a cleaner URL, as described in the GitLab Pages DNS records documentation.

Make it public🔗

After these steps, I run the usual Git commands to publish changes:

• git add .
• git commit -s -m ‘Init’
• git push

I repeat this workflow for future posts with a proper commit message 😄.