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“Written in GO and readily installable as a binary, Hugo is tremendously portable…” I am but a humble designer, who only knows enough to write some simple prot

“Written in GO and readily installable as a binary, Hugo is tremendously portable…” I am but a humble designer, who only knows enough to write some simple prototypes, and wants some organizational helps. Partials. Concatenating stylesheets. Little things that I used to use CodeKit for. And I like Hugo because of that “it’s just a binary” bit. There’s no dependency hell. No leaning tower of JS or Ruby. You install it, it sits there, nothing can really break. That’s what I want. Is that a niche criteria? Obviously. But I do appreciate it. (And if someone has a better suggestion for a very simple static site generator, bring it on.)

qbasic_forever 5y ago
Hugo can be that simple if you don't have a complex frontend template. As soon as you want to make a SPA (or SPA-like experience), use a framework like React/Vue/Svelte/etc., or even try out stuff like TailwindCSS you're going to get sucked into the deep rabbit hole of bundling frontend assets, webpack/esbuild/etc. So you kind of have to decide, are just static templates and static assets all you need? Stick with Hugo and enjoy the speed, simplicity, etc. There are some even simpler alternatives you might enjoy too, like mdbook or mkdocs. Both are more oriented towards technical docs but are similar to hugo at their core--send in some markdown (in the case of these tools you don't even need frontmatter or other schema) and get out some HTML. If you're building something fancier or using more complex frontend setups then... there's no perfect answer right now. It's all about balancing complexity of the build system with what it gives you in the output. IMHO webpack and gnarly dependencies can be tamed pretty well with a simple docker container. Spend some time getting your perfect workflow setup, chuck it in a container that a CI system can run all day, every day without fail, and you'll be pretty well setup.
- earthboundkid 5y ago
  I use Hugo with a modern front end, and it’s extremely easy to get setup, especially now that it has built in ESBuild support.
  - mtlynch 5y ago
    Can you share more about this? I like Hugo for its speed and simplicity, but I find it hard to create elements within components the way I can in Vue. I haven't found any good resources for combining Hugo with frontend frameworks, so I'm curious what you do.
    - earthboundkid 5y ago
      I've switched away from Vue to using Alpine.js, which makes it easier to combine backend templates with frontend ones, but here's the repo back when I was using Vue: https://github.com/spotlightpa/poor-richard/tree/eb816cac8079fd982e7d8cd437a7d1f28aa767f0 https://github.com/spotlightpa/poor-richard/tree/eb816cac807... src/entrypoints/donate.js defined a custom element, which was included on layouts/donate-page/single.html and layouts/partials/get-src.html conditionally included the Vue component either with Parcel's dev server in testing or precompiled files in production. It's not very different from what you'd do in any not-JS web framework.
      - mtlynch 5y ago
        Cool, thank you!
- perardi 5y ago
  So you kind of have to decide, are just static templates and static assets all you need? In my particular instance: yup. I’m at the “loop through an array of things in a folder” level, not “deploy at scale” level.
- cholantesh 5y ago
  I would think that if you wanted a SPA-like experience, you wouldn't be choosing a static site generator, no?
  - qbasic_forever 5y ago
    Everything is kind of converging. In the SPA world they realized the SEO sucks and they need static server rendered content, so there's a whole realm of SSR (server side rendering) built around it with Next.js, Vuepress, Sveltekit, etc. And on the static site side folks realized static sites can kinda suck and feel clunky, so loading some JS to add smoothness is nice. Check out Docusaurus for an example of a static site generator that actually uses React internally to build a SSR friendly SPA with fluid page loads. You don't have to choose one or the other anymore, you can get both a smooth SPA experience with full server rendered and SEO friendly content.
earthboundkid 5y ago
I have built a career around Hugo. It’s extremely capable once you learn its core concepts.
- indigodaddy 5y ago
  Can you expound a bit on what you are doing with Hugo vocationally?
  - earthboundkid 5y ago
    https://github.com/spotlightpa/poor-richard/ https://github.com/spotlightpa/poor-richard/
    - indigodaddy 5y ago
      Wow, excellent!
d0gbread 5y ago
Leaning tower of JS just hit me in the soul after two full days of composer and npm dependency hell. I'll have to give Hugo a try for my next fitting use case.
asicsp 5y ago
>And I like Hugo because of that “it’s just a binary” bit. There’s no dependency hell. I had that issue with Jekyll, I just couldn't get the set up to work on my system (to be fair, I gave up easily instead of asking for help). When I came across Zola (https://github.com/getzola/zola https://github.com/getzola/zola), I was immediately drawn by the single binary aspect.

qbasic_forever 5y ago

Hugo can be that simple if you don't have a complex frontend template. As soon as you want to make a SPA (or SPA-like experience), use a framework like React/Vue/Svelte/etc., or even try out stuff like TailwindCSS you're going to get sucked into the deep rabbit hole of bundling frontend assets, webpack/esbuild/etc. So you kind of have to decide, are just static templates and static assets all you need? Stick with Hugo and enjoy the speed, simplicity, etc. There are some even simpler alternatives you might enjoy too, like mdbook or mkdocs. Both are more oriented towards technical docs but are similar to hugo at their core--send in some markdown (in the case of these tools you don't even need frontmatter or other schema) and get out some HTML. If you're building something fancier or using more complex frontend setups then... there's no perfect answer right now. It's all about balancing complexity of the build system with what it gives you in the output. IMHO webpack and gnarly dependencies can be tamed pretty well with a simple docker container. Spend some time getting your perfect workflow setup, chuck it in a container that a CI system can run all day, every day without fail, and you'll be pretty well setup.

earthboundkid 5y ago
I use Hugo with a modern front end, and it’s extremely easy to get setup, especially now that it has built in ESBuild support.
- mtlynch 5y ago
  Can you share more about this? I like Hugo for its speed and simplicity, but I find it hard to create elements within components the way I can in Vue. I haven't found any good resources for combining Hugo with frontend frameworks, so I'm curious what you do.
  - earthboundkid 5y ago
    I've switched away from Vue to using Alpine.js, which makes it easier to combine backend templates with frontend ones, but here's the repo back when I was using Vue: https://github.com/spotlightpa/poor-richard/tree/eb816cac8079fd982e7d8cd437a7d1f28aa767f0 https://github.com/spotlightpa/poor-richard/tree/eb816cac807... src/entrypoints/donate.js defined a custom element, which was included on layouts/donate-page/single.html and layouts/partials/get-src.html conditionally included the Vue component either with Parcel's dev server in testing or precompiled files in production. It's not very different from what you'd do in any not-JS web framework.
    - mtlynch 5y ago
      Cool, thank you!
perardi 5y ago
So you kind of have to decide, are just static templates and static assets all you need? In my particular instance: yup. I’m at the “loop through an array of things in a folder” level, not “deploy at scale” level.
cholantesh 5y ago
I would think that if you wanted a SPA-like experience, you wouldn't be choosing a static site generator, no?
- qbasic_forever 5y ago
  Everything is kind of converging. In the SPA world they realized the SEO sucks and they need static server rendered content, so there's a whole realm of SSR (server side rendering) built around it with Next.js, Vuepress, Sveltekit, etc. And on the static site side folks realized static sites can kinda suck and feel clunky, so loading some JS to add smoothness is nice. Check out Docusaurus for an example of a static site generator that actually uses React internally to build a SSR friendly SPA with fluid page loads. You don't have to choose one or the other anymore, you can get both a smooth SPA experience with full server rendered and SEO friendly content.

earthboundkid 5y ago

I have built a career around Hugo. It’s extremely capable once you learn its core concepts.

indigodaddy 5y ago
Can you expound a bit on what you are doing with Hugo vocationally?
- earthboundkid 5y ago
  https://github.com/spotlightpa/poor-richard/ https://github.com/spotlightpa/poor-richard/
  - indigodaddy 5y ago
    Wow, excellent!

d0gbread 5y ago

Leaning tower of JS just hit me in the soul after two full days of composer and npm dependency hell. I'll have to give Hugo a try for my next fitting use case.

asicsp 5y ago

>And I like Hugo because of that “it’s just a binary” bit. There’s no dependency hell. I had that issue with Jekyll, I just couldn't get the set up to work on my system (to be fair, I gave up easily instead of asking for help). When I came across Zola (https://github.com/getzola/zola https://github.com/getzola/zola), I was immediately drawn by the single binary aspect.