Just as I was about to send the new site out into the world, I discovered that it was injured. Now I have to find the problem and fix it before I can launch, but that’s turning out to be trickier than expected.
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Everything works fine on my development machine, but even though the environment on my server is identical, websmith crashes when I try to run it there. Clearly, the environments are not as identical as I believed, but figuring out how they differ is proving to be a challenge.
The biggest problem is that I can’t see what’s going on inside Hugo when the problem arises, so I can’t examine the state of its variables when it crashes.
Time to dive into the documentation and support forums to figure out how other people troubleshoot their Hugo systems…
Later Update:
Turns out that an untested assumption was to blame. My server and my dev laptop both have copies of my Obsidian vault and use that as the source for my posts. Both copies are supposed to be identical, updated regularly by SyncThing from the definitive version that lives on my phone. But after investigating just about every other possible trouble point, I finally thought to confirm that the two archives were in fact identical. And as you’ve probably guessed, they were not.
Remember that problem I told you about earlier? The one where my Raspberry Pi crashed? Well it turns out that it didn’t recover as fully as I’d thought, so the vault on my server was weeks out of date. After fixing that, everything seems to be lining up properly now. Hopefully, that means my new deployment system will be operational very soon.