Installing and using Hugo

Hugo is a static site generator tool built with the Go language. I was just reading some random blog and at the bottom of their page found built with Hugo thing. After checking it I decided to give it a try, not knowing that I already have a gh pages hosted blog using Jekyll, which I never used after the first time.

Here’s how to use Hugo to generate a static site and then host it on Github pages:

Usage

Installation is pretty straightforward:

On Mac:

1

brew install hugo

On Ubuntu:

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sudo snap install hugo

After installing it, you create a site, author pages, posts and other type of content using the markdown language.

On your local machine, you can run the hugo server to see how the site looks in the browser. That’s pretty much all about the installation and basic usage.

Hosting on Github Pages

There are various options to host your hugo blog. I chose to host it on Github Pages. This blog’s GH actions setup can be found here. This GH action:

  • On push of master branch:
    • Runs a deploy job which:
      • Checksout code
      • Installs Hugo
      • Builds the static site
      • Pushes the generated site to gh-pages branch.

The prereq is that your repo’s Github pages settings (found at your-repo/settings/pages) are set to deploy from the gh-pages branch.