When I migrated from Wordpress to Hugo, I gained a simpler, lighter blog, however I also lost a few functionalities. One of them is the ability to comment the posts. Fortunately, there are external solutions and Hugo allows to include such sites. There are many solutions, both SaaS like Disqus and self-hosted like Comentario. I chose the latter.

Comentario provides a Docker image and a Docker Compose file for an easy deployment. While the documentation mentions the ability to run with SQLite, which would be more than enough for this blog, neither the binary nor the Docker image support SQLite. I don’t master Go so I decided to go with the alternative (PostgreSQL) rather than recompiling with SQLite support..

Deploying with Compose is straightforward with the above Compose file. I suggest you use env_file instead of environment. It allows you to pass sensitive environment variables to PostgreSQL, that enables you to commit the Compose file to git.

Assuming the following content for the .env file:

POSTGRESQL_DATABASE=comentario
POSTGRESQL_USERNAME=comentario
POSTGRESQL_PASSWORD=password
POSTGRESQL_POSTGRES_PASSWORD=superpassword
POSTGRESQL_LOG_CONNECTIONS=1
POSTGRESQL_LOG_DISCONNECTIONS=1

Let’s start it up with docker-compose up -d. After a short while, you should the following message:

Serving comentario at http://[::]:80

The first user you add to Comentario becomes super-admin, so do it before a bad guy does it.

You can now add it to Hugo following the documentation: update hugo.toml file and your theme, then rebuild your blog content and publish it.

Depending on your HTTP security headers, you may not be able to use your new comments right away. If you secured your Content-Security-Policy header a little bit, you may need to add your comments hostname to the following sources: script-src, style-src, connect-src, font-src.

If all went well, you should see at the bottom of your posts a form to post comments. Now, you will probably want to enable some kind of authentication backend like Facebook, GitHub, Gitlab, or Google. Or you can enable unregistered comments. It’s all up to you.

Have fun!