Hexo Static Blog Deployment on Vercel

Deploy Hexo static blog for free using Vercel

Install Hexo#

Refer to the official documentation Documentation | Hexo
In theory, you only need to complete the "Overview" and "Setup" steps
Install themes: see later section

Create a GitHub remote repository#

Create a new repo on GitHub with any name, leave other settings unchanged, and it can be set as private
Generate a Personal access token in your account settings and keep it secure.

Create a local git repository and push to GitHub#

Go to the root directory of Hexo

# Create a git repository
git init
git add .
git commit -m "first commit"
git branch -M main

# Connect to GitHub, example: https://github.com/<username>/<repo>.git
git remote add origin <your remote repository address>
# Set credential helper, remove --global parameter to save only for the current repository
git config --global credential.helper store 

git push -u origin main
# It will prompt for username and password, note that the password is the previously generated Personal access token, not the password of your GitHub account

Deploy using Vercel#

Log in to vercel.com with your GitHub account
Choose to add a new project from GitHub and select the repo you just created
It will automatically recognize it as a Hexo project, no need to make any changes, just confirm
Now you can access it using the domain provided by Vercel or use your own domain
If there are any changes in the local project, use git add ., git commit, git push, and Vercel will automatically update

Notes#

About themes#

There are pros and cons to both git clone and git submodule add, you can choose after understanding them

git clone -b master https://github.com/jerryc127/hexo-theme-butterfly.git themes/butterfly
# or
git submodule add https://github.com/jerryc127/hexo-theme-butterfly.git themes/butterfly

About file names#

If you paste a Markdown file from elsewhere, remember to remove special characters from the file name, otherwise, although it can run locally, it will result in a 404 error on Vercel
If it is a file created using hexo new, you will notice that even if there are special characters, they will be automatically removed from the file name (not affected in Front-matter), so you can confidently use special characters.