My VPS Setup Journey (From Blank Page to Live Portfolio)

i didn’t really plan this to turn into a whole journey.

i just wanted a simple portfolio online.

but somehow it ended up being me fighting linux, hugo, nginx, and dns for hours 😭

starting point Link to heading

i had a VPS sitting there doing nothing.

so i thought:

“okay let me just put a portfolio on it”

simple idea. bad assumption.

i went with Hugo because it looked fast and lightweight.

installed it, picked a theme (hugo-coder), and expected everything to just work.

it didn’t.

at first, the site just showed nothing.

no proper errors. just a blank page like it gave up on life.

then random errors started showing up:

i didn’t even know where to start fixing it.

at some point i found out i was running an old Hugo version.

like seriously old.

that was basically breaking the whole theme silently.

once i updated Hugo to a newer extended version, things started making sense again.

after that, it was more about fixing structure:

a lot of small things that quietly break everything if one detail is wrong.

once Hugo was finally building properly, i moved to deployment.

installed nginx and realized something important:

you don’t “run” Hugo on the server.

you build it once, then nginx serves the output.

that clicked way later than it should have.

then i connected my domain using DNS A records.

pointed it to the VPS IP and waited for it to propagate.

this part was surprisingly the least painful.

now everything is working:

it took way more effort than expected, but it works.

this whole thing taught me a few things:

anyway… it’s live now.

finally.