site: scheduled rebuild — publishing future-dated posts automatically

Hugo respects the date: field in a post’s frontmatter. If you set a date in the future, Hugo will not include that post in the build output until that date has passed. This is useful — write a post today, schedule it for next week.

The problem is that the build only runs when you push. If no push happens on the scheduled date, the post stays dark.

the fix

A second GitHub Actions workflow — scheduled-rebuild.yml — that runs the Hugo build, S3 sync, and CloudFront invalidation on a daily cron schedule, independent of any push.

on:
  schedule:
    - cron: '0 8 * * *'   # 08:00 UTC daily
  workflow_dispatch:

At 08:00 UTC each morning, the workflow runs the same build and deploy steps as the push-triggered deploy.yml. If a post’s scheduled date has arrived since the last push, it gets picked up and published.

workflow_dispatch is included, which adds a Run workflow button in the GitHub Actions UI. Useful for forcing a rebuild without making a dummy commit.

what it does not do

The Lambda deploy step from deploy.yml is not included. That step packages and deploys lambda/indicators.py — there is no reason to redeploy it when no code has changed. The scheduled workflow only touches the Hugo output.

why a separate workflow

The alternative is adding a schedule: trigger to the existing deploy.yml. That would work, but it would run the Lambda deploy on every scheduled build too — unnecessary and slightly wasteful. Keeping them separate keeps each workflow’s scope clear.

cost

GitHub Actions includes 2,000 free minutes per month for public repositories and 500 for private. A daily Hugo build runs in under two minutes. 365 runs per year = under 730 minutes — well within the free tier for either visibility setting.

Scott