Blog creation with Hugo

Apr 26, 2015 · 3 minute read · Comments
blog hugo

Hugo is a nice and fast blog (or static sites) creation tools written in Go.

Installation

The installation of Hugo is very simple, you just have to download the package/executable from the GitHub lastest release page and install it or copy it in a directory accessible with the PATH variable.

Debian/Raspbian

On Debian (and Raspbian), deb packages are available to download for i386, amd64 and armhf. .deb packages are very simple to install with dpkg.

Example on Raspbian (Raspberry PI B model) ARM Linux (take the lastest version if a more recent version is available!):

wget https://github.com/spf13/hugo/releases/download/v0.13/hugo_0.13_armhf.deb
sudo dpkg -i hugo_0.13_armhf.deb

And it’s done, just type hugo version to test the installation.

Raw executable

On other x64 Linux/UNIX (take the lastest version if a more recent version is available!):

#get the hugo tarball
wget https://github.com/spf13/hugo/releases/download/v0.13/hugo_0.13_linux_amd64.tar.gz
tar -xzvf hugo_0.13_linux_amd64.tar.gz

#You can copy the hugo binary somewhere else before adding it to the PATH
cd hugo_0.13_linux_amd64
#A symbolic link or an alias can be defined to use directly hugo by typing "hugo" instead of "hugo_0.13_linux_amd64"
ln -s ln -s hugo_0.13_linux_amd64 hugo
#Temporary PATH export to test only the executable from anywhere
export PATH="${PATH}:${PWD}"

And it’s done, just type hugo version to test the installation. You can customize the user account profile to automatically set the PATH variable.

Initialize a new site

You can look at the official Hugo quickstart video to have another example.

Create the site directories

Into the target empty directory use the hugo command with new site . arguments to create all

hugo new site .

The created files and directories are:

archetypes
config.toml
content
data
layouts
static

The config.toml file is the main configuration file and the content directory will contain site pages.

Installing a theme

A least one theme is required to skin the site. Available themes are listed on this dedicated GitHub project.

By using the git command the [hugo base theme] can be get from the site main directory:

mkdir -p themes
cd themes
git clone https://github.com/crakjie/hugo-base-theme.git

If you don’t have git installed, just download the zip archive from this theme repository and unzip it in your themes sub-directory.

Installing all themes

It’s possible to install all themes at once with the git command from the site main directory:

git clone --recursive https://github.com/spf13/hugoThemes.git themes

All themes can be tested to see which one do you prefer. Note: some seems partially or totally broken due to Hugo updates?

Configure the site

The sample configuration file contains:

baseurl = "http://yourSiteHere/"
languageCode = "en-us"
title = "My New Hugo Site"

To configure the installed theme, just add this line:

theme="hugo-base-theme"

Other parameters can be modified as you wish.

Creating a blog post

From the

hugo new post/test.md

This command will create a test.md file into the content/post directory with some header fields:

+++
date = "2015-04-29T23:10:31+02:00"
title = "test"
weight = 5

[menu]
  [menu.main]
    parent = "x"

+++

You can write a test content like Your skill is great! after this header.

Test the new site

Now test the site with this command, let’s rock:

hugo server

The default server URL is http://localhost:1313/ and the site must be displayed on your browser.

Sylvain Bugat