Hugo #

Hugo is a Static-Site-Generator written in Go. It claims to be the fastest SSG around because it is based on Golang’s html/templating libraries.

It can be used to generate beautiful static websites and comes with a number of themes to choose from.

Installation #

I chose the simplest installtion for MacOs by using HomeBrew.

brew install hugo

Modules

There is another way to use hugo based on Go Modules. This is the future, but it says it isn’t fully tested yet. I may switch to it in the future.

Until then the default way to install themes is with Git Submodules.

Customizing #

You can customize nearly anything you like about Hugo (and then export that as a theme if you wish). Or you can layer your changes on top of an existing theme.

Hugo makes a bunch of assumptions about the structure of your site, as all of your content pages will be under the content/ directory. Depending on which subdirectory you choose it will interpret the content type. You can override this with a Front Matter, basically a YAML block at the top of the markdown file which Hugo will use when generating. The Front Matter can override most things.

It is useful to examine the theme for which layouts / config params it is looking for. These isn’t a clean declaration of all the options available. See variables docs for existing builtin Hugo variables at the Site and Page level.

Some useful ones:

Type: Override the inferred content type, meaning you can use a different template
Slug: Override the url slug used (default is the file name). E.x. /pages/apps-slug.
Url: Override the url from the site root to this page. E.x. /pages/apps -> /apps. This can create circular references so be careful.