cyber-journalExperimentsdevops-lab

December 20, 2025 —

I Didn’t Break GitHub. GitHub Broke Me: A Hexo × Reimu × SSH Deployment War Story

If you’ve ever thought

“Bro, it’s just a static blog. How hard can it be?”

Congratulations.

You’ve already lost.

This is the story of how I tried to migrate my blog from Jekyll to Hexo using the Reimu theme… and accidentally speed-ran every possible deployment failure known to mankind.

Phase 1: The Great Migration

It started innocent enough.

Jekyll was getting annoying.

Ruby was acting like Ruby.

I wanted speed, control, and hacker aesthetics.

So I said the magic words:

“Let’s switch to Hexo.”

Then I saw hexo-theme-reimu.

Glassmorphism.

Card layouts.

Anime-inspired but still professional.

Cyberpunk energy without being cringe.

I cloned it.

I installed it.

I ran hexo s.

And immediately got slapped with:

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post.cover.startsWith is not a function

Ah yes. JavaScript’s way of saying:

“Your YAML offended me.”

Phase 2: The Cover Image Conspiracy

Turns out Reimu is very serious about post covers.

Some posts had:

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cover:

Some had:

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cover: /assets/img/something.png

Some had… vibes.

Reimu didn’t like vibes.

It wanted strings, not empty fields.

So I hunted every post like a bug bounty target:

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grep -R "cover:" source/_posts

Fixed empty covers.

Moved images properly.

Watched Windows secretly inject :Zone.Identifier files like malware.

Deleted them.

Again.

And again.

Finally:

“Yeah it works.”

Famous last words.

Phase 3: Cannot GET /friend

Navbar looked clean.

Home.

Archives.

About.

Friend.

Clicked Friend.

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Cannot GET /friend

Classic.

Turns out “friend” pages don’t magically exist just because you believe in them.

So I did what any sane hacker would do:

  • Deleted “friend”
  • Replaced it with Portfolio
  • Linked directly to my actual work

No fake pages.

No broken routes.

No lies.

Phase 4: RSS Is Not an API Key (But Close)

I enabled RSS.

Clicked it.

Browser downloaded atom.xml.

My brain:

“Why is this downloading?”

Reality check:

RSS is not for humans.

It’s for readers, bots, aggregators, and other digital goblins.

Yes — anyone can consume your posts.

No — they can’t edit them.

No — this is not leaking your soul.

RSS is good.

RSS is power.

We keep RSS.

You know the one.

Powered by Hexo

Theme Reimu

Look, respect to the devs.

But this is my site.

So:

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powered: false
count: false
busuanzi: false

No fake view counters.

No “0 views” humiliation.

No unnecessary flex.

Clean footer.

Professional energy.

Phase 6: The SSH Key Nightmare

Now comes the boss fight.

I run:

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hexo d

GitHub replies:

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Username for 'https://github.com':

Wait.

Why HTTPS?

I already have SSH.

Test SSH:

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ssh -T git@github.com

GitHub:

Hi ArenRedd! You’ve successfully authenticated.

So why is Hexo acting like it’s 2012?

Answer:

Hexo doesn’t care about your SSH key.

It cares about the repo URL.

And mine was still:

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https://github.com/username/repo.git

So GitHub kept asking for a password I don’t even remember.

I generated keys.

Overwrote keys.

Added wrong filenames.

Tried to ssh-add files that didn’t exist.

Created keys named like homework files.

Chaos.

Finally, the real fix:

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repo: git@github.com:ArenRedd/arenredd.github.io.git

And then the most important command of all:

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rm -rf .deploy_git

Hexo was caching the old HTTPS repo like trauma.

Phase 7: Victory

I ran:

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hexo clean
hexo g
hexo d

No username prompt.

No password prompt.

No errors.

Just deployment.

Pages generated.

Assets loaded.

Blog live.

I didn’t break GitHub.

GitHub just wanted me to understand it deeply.

Final Thoughts

This wasn’t “just a blog setup”.

This was:

  • Debugging YAML
  • Fighting Windows metadata
  • Understanding how Hexo actually deploys
  • Learning why SSH matters
  • Cleaning configs like a SOC analyst

And now?

I own my pipeline.

If you’re reading this while stuck at

“Username for https://github.com”

or

“Cannot GET /about”

You’re not dumb.

You’re just leveling up.