7 ms·

Minimum Viable Hugo

153 points by hiAndrewQuinn 4y ago

superkuh 4y ago
You can just write HTML too. It is much simpler, easier to maintain, and more secure (using a real webserver). Make .html files, open them in a text editor, type in the HTML. Here, I'll make an example like the minimum viable hugo. $ sudo apt get install nginx <html><head><title>Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet</title></head><body><h1>Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet</h1></body></html> And now save it as index.html in the www directory that installing nginx creates. Check it out at http://127.0.0.1/ http://127.0.0.1/ . Go to your router and forward port 80 to the IP address of the computer running nginx to make it public.
- ajorgensen 4y ago
  I think the intent of OP was to help people get setup with Hugo so your comment is pretty off topic. Yes you could set up php, elm, a full lamp stack, rails, heck you dont even need nginx to serve a static .html file but none of that will help someone get setup with Hugo if that's what they want to use for static site generation.
- FredPret 4y ago
  nginx is magic
- ajkjk 4y ago
  Ignoring your sarcasm: nobody wants that, for good reason.
  - elliotec 4y ago
    What do you think is the good reason?
    - ajkjk 4y ago
      because writing HTML manually is fucking terrible compared to authoring markdown. We (i.e. everybody) are trying to improve things because they are bad.
      - elliotec 4y ago
        I mean, I agree that incremental improvements are great but also I think your hyperbole is a bit of an overreaction. I use markdown and templates and Software people rightly prefer reuse and DRY principles but handwriting html is honestly only barely a notch more primitive.
    - marcosdumay 4y ago
      HTML files can't reuse anything, HTML is a pretty bad verbose language, it is hard to keep indexes and links up to date when you change your site, and well, a lot of other reasons that I didn't think about because I gave-up on that in the 90's.
  - superkuh 4y ago
    I'm not being sarcastic. It is what I've done for 20+ years (although I only switched from thttpd to nginx in ~2010). The linked article does not really teach you how to use hugo. It just shows how to generate a single page, and there are far better ways to do that. And like others have said, nginx comes with server side includes built in. It's the perfect amount of dynamic templating power with the minimal attack surface. Before anyone jumps in with, "but I can deploy (or other cargo cult terms) my website to a CDN if I use Hugo for templating." I question the utility and complexity of bringing in a CDN in this, minimum viable context or any personal website context.
    - count 4y ago
      I can deploy [sic] my website to a static file serving service for virtually free (e.g. S3, GitHub Pages, Azure Static Sites, etc.) without having a CDN and without having to worry about renewing SSL certs, managing a full linux instance or container, patching the web server when stuff gets hacked, doing maintenance, etc. There's a ton of value in 'just static pages', and if you do more than 1, not writing your own HTML is pretty great.
- hk1337 4y ago
  Blasphemy! I must overcomplicate it so the build takes a significant amount of time in the CI workflow. /s
  - doodlesdev 4y ago
    Hugo builds and Jekyll builds are basically instantaneous even for really large websites. I mean less than one second. Like 30ms. You don't even see it happen. Migrating your manually crafted HTML pages to something other than NGINX or changing the theme or website is going to be such a pain in the ass you're going to wish you never thought of this "minimalist" way of doing it. If you look at the website of the guy above at superkuh.com it looks like shit (subjective, of course), doesn't even have a TLS certificate and above all would be an extreme pain to change the layout, design, deployment, etc. I don't even know what to say about this chart in his last post at http://erewhon.superkuh.com/pictures/blog-posts-vs-blog-posts-about-tools.jpg http://erewhon.superkuh.com/pictures/blog-posts-vs-blog-post... although I must admit it's really funny.
- yamtaddle 4y ago
  Use SSI for header/footer/menu segments and write about 5 lines of bash and you've got all the site generator you need, too, and you can run your "generator" on basically any unixy machine without installing anything. I find writing raw HTML for basic documents to be very fast and easy with a modern editor with hinting/autocomplete. Not any slower than Markdown, really.
  - lelanthran 4y ago
    I wrote a bash script (https://gist.github.com/lelanthran/2634fc2508c93a437ba5ca511fafa99d https://gist.github.com/lelanthran/2634fc2508c93a437ba5ca511...) that lets me very simply add new posts to my blog. For my actual blog I reversed the order that the first are processed. Looks okay, I think, just short on functionality (no I Tractivity). https://www.lelanthran.com https://www.lelanthran.com ... feedback welcome.
  - ufo 4y ago
    What is SSI?
    - yamtaddle 4y ago
      Ancient, arcane technology: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Server_Side_Includes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Server_Side_Includes
      - mxuribe 4y ago
        As an oldie on the web, i would state that while it might be "ancient, arcane", but it was amazingly awesome at the time....and some still leverage this neat technology to great benefit. ;-)
  - projektfu 4y ago
    Doesn't SSI kind of make the site not static anymore?
- nicoburns 4y ago
  Hugo also typically uses a real webserver like nginx... it just gives you some niceties like templating and SASS on top of that.
dfindley 4y ago
I also experienced this when trying out Hugo. I think the issue is when you go into it with the expectation of building a simple website that you build from scratch, rather than a pre-built theme. Personally, I found that Zola was much simpler for starting from scratch.
- mmsimanga 4y ago
  I tried both and ended up with WordPress of all things. I really don't blog and after a year without making a post I couldn't figure out my own Hugo site. I had also changed computers and my site wouldn't build anymore. I think Hugo is fantastic but probably best for regularly bloggers.
  - hiAndrewQuinn 4y ago
    WP gets a bad rap honestly. I like what the folks over at WPEngine are doing a lot.
_benj 4y ago
Thanks for this! One of my frustration with tools nowadays is that they aim to be so "user friendly" that actually make things complicated and thus understanding how something works, which allows one to be more productive with a tool, is hidden under tons of layers of complexity and simplistic "getting started" that can indeed make an amazing looking website with 1 command, but from there on, trying to figure out _how_ that amazing website works and how can I adapt it for my need is a rough journey!
- IceHegel 4y ago
  Unless a tool is so ubiquitous and widely used that it becomes a new standard (like JavaScript), over abstraction is a very real problem.
- svat 4y ago
  Exactly. I ran into this when trying to set up Hugo, and wrote for myself a notes page with the following: # What is Hugo? `hugo` is a program that takes some .md files (ideally, conforming to a certain directory structure) and creates some .html and .xml files (conforming to another directory structure). This is the minimal command: # Create input directory structure to silence warnings mkdir content layouts{,/tags,/categories} touch layouts/home.html layouts/{categories,tags}/list.html # Run hugo: creates public/ and resources/ hugo …and building from there. If you read the Hugo documentation, it talks about all kinds of stuff but doesn't explain anything from the bottom up: apparently the usual way is to start with a pre-existing theme or site as template and edit it, but that's not explained anywhere either. After you eventually learn exactly what Hugo is, it becomes ok to use.
  - leetrout 4y ago
    I plan to record a small (4?) series of videos about starting with Hugo from scratch. Would love to hear any pain points you specifically think need to be addressed.
    - projektfu 4y ago
      Being a video is a pain point for me. I much prefer a useful text tutorial with code I can copy, etc. But I don't want to be a choosy beggar so you do you :)
spookie 4y ago
Lovely. Gotta say, it's great that Hugo makes it easy for non devs to get going. But, if you wanna hack something together, the clay becomes too difficult to mold. Glad this sorted that out.
- qudat 4y ago
  Yep, it's one reason why I wrote https://prose.sh https://prose.sh -- a middleground between self-hosting a hugo site and copying markdown files to a managed blog site.
  - freeplay 4y ago
    That actually looks really cool. I particularly like your signup process.
andrenotgiant 4y ago
This is great, but for different reasons than the README implies. > "Hugo sounds great! Let me try it out!" > "Okay, I made a new theme and a page in content/!!" > "Running hugo server -D now!!! ... Where is it!!!!" It's not Hugo itself that is complicated, it's all the other JS and CSS dependencies that other getting started repos tend to layer in.
yboris 4y ago
I've been loving Hugo. I built https://utilitarianism.net/ https://utilitarianism.net/ with it https://github.com/whyboris/utilitarianism.net https://github.com/whyboris/utilitarianism.net For my personal and dev sites I used to use Gatsby, but migrated to Hugo just this month: https://github.com/whyboris/homepage https://github.com/whyboris/homepage & https://github.com/whyboris/homepage-dev https://github.com/whyboris/homepage-dev I'm pleased with how little boilerplate Hugo actually needs. My personal websites have so few files to maintain / worry over :)
- hiAndrewQuinn 4y ago
  Classy and direct, I like it. Serifed fonts always bring me back to the days where I would sit in the old mahogany chairs of my university library and just read whatever came to mind. If I had more free time I would love to build a similar website for Nicholas Rescher's approach to process philosophy, that's my particular hobby horse, Rescher and maybe a little Charles Hartshorne for flavor.
- garyrob 4y ago
  I really like the look of this. I don't see a license statement on your github; I'd be tempted to use it if you want people to be able to!
  - yboris 4y ago
    I'm a little unsure what license I can slap on the repository, since even though I've written all the code, the content (text) was written by 3 philosophy professors & the guest essays were by other authors. While they are currently working on making this an Open Access Textbook I'm unsure what license I am allowed to attach to it. Perhaps when they coordinate with their publisher they will know better - I've been meaning to ask. Happy to hear suggestions :)
    - rsolva 4y ago
      License the code to AGPL and the articles to Creative Commons?
obituary_latte 4y ago
Is it just me or is the repo empty (besides readme and license) for anyone else?
- sphars 4y ago
  I believe it's intentional. The README has all the instructions and commands for Hugo to generate the HTML, so you don't need anything else.
  - obituary_latte 4y ago
    Ah, duh...that makes sense! Thank you!
RazorX 4y ago
Since we're sharing, here is my personal site in Hugo without using any starter templates or themes. https://github.com/evansosenko/evansosenko.com https://github.com/evansosenko/evansosenko.com Going back to basics and having zero external dependencies is quite enjoyable. Understanding how Hugo templates, themes, and content all work together was more complicated than I originally expected, but they have build a good system. Hopefully this helps anyone looking to get started.
- hiAndrewQuinn 4y ago
  This is an excellent little website, I'm I work with a few guys who have been playing CS for ages and I bet they'll get a real kick out of Pure skill next time I see them at the office.
kissgyorgy 4y ago
This is exactly why I gave up on Hugo and LOVE mkdocs-material. It has such a simple setup and such a good out of the box experience that you can start with it literally in minutes. I was so surprised that the second command is serve and you actually get a working site, which you can iterate and fine-tune later.
- pydry 4y ago
  I had the exact same experience. Everything that sucked about hugo that I discovered only after a week of trying to do something simple with it was fixed with mkdocs. It made me appreciate that static site generators look easy up front but are actually a huge amount of work to do right.
Daegalus 4y ago
Ive used mkdocs at work, and Hugo for my personal blogs and sites (I recently created https://cyphersrd.quest https://cyphersrd.quest using Hugo). I will say at first its always takes a second to remember how all the folders nad files interplay, especially the `_index.md` file, but after that its super clean. I tend to find a theme that I like that is MIT or ISC licensed, and then modify it from there to my liking. Like for the site I linked, I started with `hugo-book` but didn't like some of the coloring, so I transplanted a good chunk of Water.css into it and it looks good now.
- baby 4y ago
  Every time I use hugo I feel like it’s way too complicated for what it offers
  - Daegalus 4y ago
    I think thats mostly because the default setup and boilerplate make it seem that way. You only really need a `config.{toml,yaml,json}` a `content` folder and a 1 file theme like the one in the article of this thread. Everything else is just extras. I will admit I am currently for fun working on my own static site generator, and its slowly getting pretty complex just implementing the basics. Which gives me a new appreciation for what Hugo is doing, and many other site generators. The more generic and multi-featured you make it, the complexity just increases.
    - baby 4y ago
      I think my gripes are mostly in how the folder is organized. It’s just confusing.
college_physics 4y ago
I am using hugo for several years now, so quite thankful for what it offers but I am slowly coming to the conclusion that i) you need to learn go to get the most out of it and ii) a "semi-dynamic" site that uses a simple sqlite backend might be a sweeter spot (for my needs) in terms of balancing simplicity, features and practicality. I did't not find yet a replacement though. One reason is that I would love to continue having markdown as the main format for creating content but somehow that is orthogonal to having that markup stored in a db backend instead of the filesystem.
- schemescape 4y ago
  Out of curiosity, what do you need a database for? Could you just regenerate your static site when the database updates, thus allowing you to keep serving static HTML?
  - college_physics 4y ago
    its various little annoyances: rebuilding a site can be tricky when you are on the move (say with a mobile device) and just want to add/edit a bit of content. or to give editing access to non-technical people. or the search capabilities that are more powerful with a db etc. it feels that between the spartan austerity of an SSG and an overengineered full-blown database-backed CMS there might be some intermediate option. or maybe not :-)
    - hiAndrewQuinn 4y ago
      Oh, those are interesting issues. I've had a similar hankering but for me it's 99% just because I want a nice comments system. I've toyed with the idea of taking a project like Issi and rolling up a SaaS based on it which basically provides an SQLite comments system. Paste one line of JavaScript into the page, and boom.
    - RobMurray 4y ago
      Netlify CMS: https://www.netlifycms.org/ https://www.netlifycms.org/
IshKebab 4y ago
I tried all these static site generators for a blog, but they're all too complicated and too much faff for that. In the end I went with Markdown, Pandoc and a Makefile. Works well & I completely understand it.
umvi 4y ago
If all you care about is maintaining a simple blog or personal site I recommend just writing your own static site generator. Seriously, it takes probably an hour of work and ~100 lines of code or less and you can customize it however you want. Here's the static site generator I wrote for my site (https://bryanpg.com https://bryanpg.com): https://gist.github.com/RPGillespie6/b133854b8ebf5a983cf32c26d684cff3 https://gist.github.com/RPGillespie6/b133854b8ebf5a983cf32c2... I might tweak it to auto-generate the RSS xml as well at some point, that'll be another 10-20 lines tops.
- asb 4y ago
  I've also found that a custom-written generator is surprisingly productive. My own attempt is at https://github.com/muxup/muxup-site/blob/main/build.py https://github.com/muxup/muxup-site/blob/main/build.py and I wrote up a few notes on it here https://muxup.com/2022q3/muxup-implementation-notes#site-generation https://muxup.com/2022q3/muxup-implementation-notes#site-gen....
powersnail 4y ago
Love Hugo. Been using Hugo for quite some time. But I agree with the author that there is a "Running hugo server -D now!!! ... Where is it!!!!" problem when following the tutorial. Hugo has many "magic" based on names, "index.md" vs "_index.md", template look up hierarchy, global variables and functions (sometimes capitalized, sometimes not; some are behind a context, some are not), etc. It's hard to tell what name is required, what is configurable, and what is just accident, until you've delved into the detailed documentation. And to make the matter more complicated, themes sometimes use name magics, too. I also hope that Hugo can just allow piping stuff through external programs in its templates. Right now, Hugo provides a pretty large number of APIs on resource transformation, regexes, string manipulation, and hell, you can even download stuff in templates. But to be honest, it's way easier to just write a shell script. If I were to make my own static site generator, I think I'd probably opt for less flexibility, and simpler logic, especially with regard to what file ends up where. Let the generator handle the basic MD->HTML transformation, the skeleton of the site, producing feeds and metadata. And let external programs handle everything else.
BeetleB 4y ago
Or just use Pelican.
- marcosdumay 4y ago
  I started using Zola (Hugo's clone in Rust) when Pelican stopped being something I was able to use. Is it still maintained? Because all I got were incompatibilities with the newer Python versions.
  - BeetleB 4y ago
    I never had issues with Python versions - I occasionally had issues with newer Pelican versions (backward incompatibilities). It continues to work for me - been using it for over a decade.
_def 4y ago
I recently started a blog again with Hugo and I like how you can easily use a github workflow to build and deploy it. This way you can even just use github in your browser to publish.
simplyinfinity 4y ago
I just started using Hugo, but boy, are the docs bad... and I mean REAL BAD. It took me an HOUR to setup a theme. Then another 30 mins to realize I've set up the theme the wrong way, using a git submodule, instead of a go module. Then installation of the go module itself took another 30 mins of debugging, because nothing was working out of the box. And nowhere in the documentations are things explained for novices. The docs are written in a way that assumes you already know Hugo's ins and outs. uh... At this point, I would've been better off with a WordPress install that takes 5 minutes to do manually.
- crecker 4y ago
  Bep is rewriting the docs because are really incomprehensible. I do agree with you.
  - yawpitch 4y ago
    Four years ago Bep was rewriting the docs because they were incomprehensible (https://yawpitchroll.com/posts/hugo-probably-is-not-for-you/)… https://yawpitchroll.com/posts/hugo-probably-is-not-for-you/... last week I started looking again, and I wouldn’t say anything has improved, nor do I expect it to in 4 more.
    - pooper 4y ago
      Note to reader: the link is mangled up a little I think because of the closing parentheses? Here is a link without parentheses https://yawpitchroll.com/posts/hugo-probably-is-not-for-you/ https://yawpitchroll.com/posts/hugo-probably-is-not-for-you/
- mhb 4y ago
  Is there a good alternative? Would be nice if it is in Python. Maybe Pelican, Nikola, Hyde?
  - antihero 4y ago
    Astro is pretty awesome if you’re ok with TS/JS.
hiAndrewQuinn 4y ago
Moi, OP here. Thanks for stopping by this post and sharing your thoughts. I have nothing to sell, but I am looking for mentors. Let me know if you have knowledge worth passing down.
Arch-TK 4y ago
It took me an afternoon to glue together my own DIY SSG with all the features I wanted. I did that after a previous SSG didn't do what I wanted and I didn't know how to fix it since I don't know ruby. An SSG especially is such a low-risk project. Probably the most carefree code you could possibly write.
amai 4y ago
Hugo is not made for minimum viable blogs. Its advantage in performance only becomes important for bigger websites or blogs with thousands of articles. But especially for bigger websites it should be possible to auto-generate a good archive. However the developers of Hugo stubbornly refuse to fix this very important 8 year old issue: https://github.com/gohugoio/hugo/issues/448 https://github.com/gohugoio/hugo/issues/448 That is quite unfortunate, because it makes Hugo "the worlds fastest framework for building huge websites without a useful archive".
- frosted-flakes 4y ago
  It doesn't sound like the Hugo developer (bep) "stubbornly refuses" to fix that issue. It's on the roadmap, after all. Rather, it sounds like it's simply not a high priority task, and other things have taken up his time. It is a free product, after all.
  - amai 4y ago
    It's on the roadmap since 8 years. But the problem I have with this free kind of software is that they claim on their website " The world's fastest framework for websites". That generates some expectations. They don't claim "the world's slowest hobby project, written by people in their spare time for no money." So it shouldn't be a surprise that people get disappointed, if important features are missing from "the world's fastest framework".
thenoblesunfish 4y ago
I tried to make a minimal Hugo site just a few days ago. There is a quickstart on their website, which I followed, and it seemed to work as expected. Did I get lucky? Am I in for a world of pain as I try to go beyond the extremely minimal site I have now?
hendry 4y ago
Made similar work here https://dabase.com/e/04066/ https://dabase.com/e/04066/
falkensmaz3 4y ago
I swear folks. Take an hour and read the docs carefully. It’s not difficult to get a scratch site up and running with Hugo. The obsession with “mean time to dopamine” is exhausting.
ninefoxgambit 4y ago
I've always found Hugo easy to get running. Compared to Jekyll, Hugo was always much easier as Jekyll always seemed to throw up some Ruby or Bundler issue every time you went back to it. I've built a lot of Hugo sites and templates, I have 10+ open source themes at https://github.com/zerostaticthemes https://github.com/zerostaticthemes so here are my main observations of Hugo * The docs do need a lot of work, but the forums and stack overflow are pretty reliable sources with Hugo having enough critical mass to get answers for even obscure errors and questions. * Hugos big problem is the Go templating language. It's arcane and unintuitive. Even after years I still find myself forgetting how to do and or conditionals. * Hugos template lookup order is opinionated but one of it's strengths. * Hugos . context is opinionated but also one of it's strengths. If you are looking for a minimal SSG then I think it's important that it's HTML based (so no Nextjs or Gatsby) - Jekyll, Hugo and 11ty are the main options in this space but there is also a wave of new options which seem worth considering. There is a great list of ssgs over at www.staticgen.com if you want to browse the up and comers.

153 points by hiAndrewQuinn 4y ago

You can just write HTML too. It is much simpler, easier to maintain, and more secure (using a real webserver). Make .html files, open them in a text editor, type in the HTML. Here, I'll make an example like the minimum viable hugo. $ sudo apt get install nginx <html><head><title>Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet</title></head><body><h1>Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet</h1></body></html> And now save it as index.html in the www directory that installing nginx creates. Check it out at http://127.0.0.1/ http://127.0.0.1/ . Go to your router and forward port 80 to the IP address of the computer running nginx to make it public.

ajorgensen 4y ago
I think the intent of OP was to help people get setup with Hugo so your comment is pretty off topic. Yes you could set up php, elm, a full lamp stack, rails, heck you dont even need nginx to serve a static .html file but none of that will help someone get setup with Hugo if that's what they want to use for static site generation.
FredPret 4y ago
nginx is magic
ajkjk 4y ago
Ignoring your sarcasm: nobody wants that, for good reason.
- elliotec 4y ago
  What do you think is the good reason?
  - ajkjk 4y ago
    because writing HTML manually is fucking terrible compared to authoring markdown. We (i.e. everybody) are trying to improve things because they are bad.
    - elliotec 4y ago
      I mean, I agree that incremental improvements are great but also I think your hyperbole is a bit of an overreaction. I use markdown and templates and Software people rightly prefer reuse and DRY principles but handwriting html is honestly only barely a notch more primitive.
  - marcosdumay 4y ago
    HTML files can't reuse anything, HTML is a pretty bad verbose language, it is hard to keep indexes and links up to date when you change your site, and well, a lot of other reasons that I didn't think about because I gave-up on that in the 90's.
- superkuh 4y ago
  I'm not being sarcastic. It is what I've done for 20+ years (although I only switched from thttpd to nginx in ~2010). The linked article does not really teach you how to use hugo. It just shows how to generate a single page, and there are far better ways to do that. And like others have said, nginx comes with server side includes built in. It's the perfect amount of dynamic templating power with the minimal attack surface. Before anyone jumps in with, "but I can deploy (or other cargo cult terms) my website to a CDN if I use Hugo for templating." I question the utility and complexity of bringing in a CDN in this, minimum viable context or any personal website context.
  - count 4y ago
    I can deploy [sic] my website to a static file serving service for virtually free (e.g. S3, GitHub Pages, Azure Static Sites, etc.) without having a CDN and without having to worry about renewing SSL certs, managing a full linux instance or container, patching the web server when stuff gets hacked, doing maintenance, etc. There's a ton of value in 'just static pages', and if you do more than 1, not writing your own HTML is pretty great.
hk1337 4y ago
Blasphemy! I must overcomplicate it so the build takes a significant amount of time in the CI workflow. /s
- doodlesdev 4y ago
  Hugo builds and Jekyll builds are basically instantaneous even for really large websites. I mean less than one second. Like 30ms. You don't even see it happen. Migrating your manually crafted HTML pages to something other than NGINX or changing the theme or website is going to be such a pain in the ass you're going to wish you never thought of this "minimalist" way of doing it. If you look at the website of the guy above at superkuh.com it looks like shit (subjective, of course), doesn't even have a TLS certificate and above all would be an extreme pain to change the layout, design, deployment, etc. I don't even know what to say about this chart in his last post at http://erewhon.superkuh.com/pictures/blog-posts-vs-blog-posts-about-tools.jpg http://erewhon.superkuh.com/pictures/blog-posts-vs-blog-post... although I must admit it's really funny.
yamtaddle 4y ago
Use SSI for header/footer/menu segments and write about 5 lines of bash and you've got all the site generator you need, too, and you can run your "generator" on basically any unixy machine without installing anything. I find writing raw HTML for basic documents to be very fast and easy with a modern editor with hinting/autocomplete. Not any slower than Markdown, really.
- lelanthran 4y ago
  I wrote a bash script (https://gist.github.com/lelanthran/2634fc2508c93a437ba5ca511fafa99d https://gist.github.com/lelanthran/2634fc2508c93a437ba5ca511...) that lets me very simply add new posts to my blog. For my actual blog I reversed the order that the first are processed. Looks okay, I think, just short on functionality (no I Tractivity). https://www.lelanthran.com https://www.lelanthran.com ... feedback welcome.
- ufo 4y ago
  What is SSI?
  - yamtaddle 4y ago
    Ancient, arcane technology: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Server_Side_Includes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Server_Side_Includes
    - mxuribe 4y ago
      As an oldie on the web, i would state that while it might be "ancient, arcane", but it was amazingly awesome at the time....and some still leverage this neat technology to great benefit. ;-)
- projektfu 4y ago
  Doesn't SSI kind of make the site not static anymore?
nicoburns 4y ago
Hugo also typically uses a real webserver like nginx... it just gives you some niceties like templating and SASS on top of that.

dfindley 4y ago

I also experienced this when trying out Hugo. I think the issue is when you go into it with the expectation of building a simple website that you build from scratch, rather than a pre-built theme. Personally, I found that Zola was much simpler for starting from scratch.

mmsimanga 4y ago
I tried both and ended up with WordPress of all things. I really don't blog and after a year without making a post I couldn't figure out my own Hugo site. I had also changed computers and my site wouldn't build anymore. I think Hugo is fantastic but probably best for regularly bloggers.
- hiAndrewQuinn 4y ago
  WP gets a bad rap honestly. I like what the folks over at WPEngine are doing a lot.

_benj 4y ago

Thanks for this! One of my frustration with tools nowadays is that they aim to be so "user friendly" that actually make things complicated and thus understanding how something works, which allows one to be more productive with a tool, is hidden under tons of layers of complexity and simplistic "getting started" that can indeed make an amazing looking website with 1 command, but from there on, trying to figure out _how_ that amazing website works and how can I adapt it for my need is a rough journey!

IceHegel 4y ago
Unless a tool is so ubiquitous and widely used that it becomes a new standard (like JavaScript), over abstraction is a very real problem.
svat 4y ago
Exactly. I ran into this when trying to set up Hugo, and wrote for myself a notes page with the following: # What is Hugo? `hugo` is a program that takes some .md files (ideally, conforming to a certain directory structure) and creates some .html and .xml files (conforming to another directory structure). This is the minimal command: # Create input directory structure to silence warnings mkdir content layouts{,/tags,/categories} touch layouts/home.html layouts/{categories,tags}/list.html # Run hugo: creates public/ and resources/ hugo …and building from there. If you read the Hugo documentation, it talks about all kinds of stuff but doesn't explain anything from the bottom up: apparently the usual way is to start with a pre-existing theme or site as template and edit it, but that's not explained anywhere either. After you eventually learn exactly what Hugo is, it becomes ok to use.
- leetrout 4y ago
  I plan to record a small (4?) series of videos about starting with Hugo from scratch. Would love to hear any pain points you specifically think need to be addressed.
  - projektfu 4y ago
    Being a video is a pain point for me. I much prefer a useful text tutorial with code I can copy, etc. But I don't want to be a choosy beggar so you do you :)

spookie 4y ago

Lovely. Gotta say, it's great that Hugo makes it easy for non devs to get going. But, if you wanna hack something together, the clay becomes too difficult to mold. Glad this sorted that out.

qudat 4y ago
Yep, it's one reason why I wrote https://prose.sh https://prose.sh -- a middleground between self-hosting a hugo site and copying markdown files to a managed blog site.
- freeplay 4y ago
  That actually looks really cool. I particularly like your signup process.

andrenotgiant 4y ago

This is great, but for different reasons than the README implies. > "Hugo sounds great! Let me try it out!" > "Okay, I made a new theme and a page in content/!!" > "Running hugo server -D now!!! ... Where is it!!!!" It's not Hugo itself that is complicated, it's all the other JS and CSS dependencies that other getting started repos tend to layer in.

yboris 4y ago

I've been loving Hugo. I built https://utilitarianism.net/ https://utilitarianism.net/ with it https://github.com/whyboris/utilitarianism.net https://github.com/whyboris/utilitarianism.net For my personal and dev sites I used to use Gatsby, but migrated to Hugo just this month: https://github.com/whyboris/homepage https://github.com/whyboris/homepage & https://github.com/whyboris/homepage-dev https://github.com/whyboris/homepage-dev I'm pleased with how little boilerplate Hugo actually needs. My personal websites have so few files to maintain / worry over :)

hiAndrewQuinn 4y ago
Classy and direct, I like it. Serifed fonts always bring me back to the days where I would sit in the old mahogany chairs of my university library and just read whatever came to mind. If I had more free time I would love to build a similar website for Nicholas Rescher's approach to process philosophy, that's my particular hobby horse, Rescher and maybe a little Charles Hartshorne for flavor.
garyrob 4y ago
I really like the look of this. I don't see a license statement on your github; I'd be tempted to use it if you want people to be able to!
- yboris 4y ago
  I'm a little unsure what license I can slap on the repository, since even though I've written all the code, the content (text) was written by 3 philosophy professors & the guest essays were by other authors. While they are currently working on making this an Open Access Textbook I'm unsure what license I am allowed to attach to it. Perhaps when they coordinate with their publisher they will know better - I've been meaning to ask. Happy to hear suggestions :)
  - rsolva 4y ago
    License the code to AGPL and the articles to Creative Commons?

obituary_latte 4y ago

Is it just me or is the repo empty (besides readme and license) for anyone else?

sphars 4y ago
I believe it's intentional. The README has all the instructions and commands for Hugo to generate the HTML, so you don't need anything else.
- obituary_latte 4y ago
  Ah, duh...that makes sense! Thank you!

RazorX 4y ago

Since we're sharing, here is my personal site in Hugo without using any starter templates or themes. https://github.com/evansosenko/evansosenko.com https://github.com/evansosenko/evansosenko.com Going back to basics and having zero external dependencies is quite enjoyable. Understanding how Hugo templates, themes, and content all work together was more complicated than I originally expected, but they have build a good system. Hopefully this helps anyone looking to get started.

hiAndrewQuinn 4y ago
This is an excellent little website, I'm I work with a few guys who have been playing CS for ages and I bet they'll get a real kick out of Pure skill next time I see them at the office.

kissgyorgy 4y ago

This is exactly why I gave up on Hugo and LOVE mkdocs-material. It has such a simple setup and such a good out of the box experience that you can start with it literally in minutes. I was so surprised that the second command is serve and you actually get a working site, which you can iterate and fine-tune later.

pydry 4y ago
I had the exact same experience. Everything that sucked about hugo that I discovered only after a week of trying to do something simple with it was fixed with mkdocs. It made me appreciate that static site generators look easy up front but are actually a huge amount of work to do right.

Daegalus 4y ago

Ive used mkdocs at work, and Hugo for my personal blogs and sites (I recently created https://cyphersrd.quest https://cyphersrd.quest using Hugo). I will say at first its always takes a second to remember how all the folders nad files interplay, especially the `_index.md` file, but after that its super clean. I tend to find a theme that I like that is MIT or ISC licensed, and then modify it from there to my liking. Like for the site I linked, I started with `hugo-book` but didn't like some of the coloring, so I transplanted a good chunk of Water.css into it and it looks good now.

baby 4y ago
Every time I use hugo I feel like it’s way too complicated for what it offers
- Daegalus 4y ago
  I think thats mostly because the default setup and boilerplate make it seem that way. You only really need a `config.{toml,yaml,json}` a `content` folder and a 1 file theme like the one in the article of this thread. Everything else is just extras. I will admit I am currently for fun working on my own static site generator, and its slowly getting pretty complex just implementing the basics. Which gives me a new appreciation for what Hugo is doing, and many other site generators. The more generic and multi-featured you make it, the complexity just increases.
  - baby 4y ago
    I think my gripes are mostly in how the folder is organized. It’s just confusing.

college_physics 4y ago

I am using hugo for several years now, so quite thankful for what it offers but I am slowly coming to the conclusion that i) you need to learn go to get the most out of it and ii) a "semi-dynamic" site that uses a simple sqlite backend might be a sweeter spot (for my needs) in terms of balancing simplicity, features and practicality. I did't not find yet a replacement though. One reason is that I would love to continue having markdown as the main format for creating content but somehow that is orthogonal to having that markup stored in a db backend instead of the filesystem.

schemescape 4y ago
Out of curiosity, what do you need a database for? Could you just regenerate your static site when the database updates, thus allowing you to keep serving static HTML?
- college_physics 4y ago
  its various little annoyances: rebuilding a site can be tricky when you are on the move (say with a mobile device) and just want to add/edit a bit of content. or to give editing access to non-technical people. or the search capabilities that are more powerful with a db etc. it feels that between the spartan austerity of an SSG and an overengineered full-blown database-backed CMS there might be some intermediate option. or maybe not :-)
  - hiAndrewQuinn 4y ago
    Oh, those are interesting issues. I've had a similar hankering but for me it's 99% just because I want a nice comments system. I've toyed with the idea of taking a project like Issi and rolling up a SaaS based on it which basically provides an SQLite comments system. Paste one line of JavaScript into the page, and boom.
  - RobMurray 4y ago
    Netlify CMS: https://www.netlifycms.org/ https://www.netlifycms.org/

IshKebab 4y ago

I tried all these static site generators for a blog, but they're all too complicated and too much faff for that. In the end I went with Markdown, Pandoc and a Makefile. Works well & I completely understand it.

umvi 4y ago

If all you care about is maintaining a simple blog or personal site I recommend just writing your own static site generator. Seriously, it takes probably an hour of work and ~100 lines of code or less and you can customize it however you want. Here's the static site generator I wrote for my site (https://bryanpg.com https://bryanpg.com): https://gist.github.com/RPGillespie6/b133854b8ebf5a983cf32c26d684cff3 https://gist.github.com/RPGillespie6/b133854b8ebf5a983cf32c2... I might tweak it to auto-generate the RSS xml as well at some point, that'll be another 10-20 lines tops.

asb 4y ago
I've also found that a custom-written generator is surprisingly productive. My own attempt is at https://github.com/muxup/muxup-site/blob/main/build.py https://github.com/muxup/muxup-site/blob/main/build.py and I wrote up a few notes on it here https://muxup.com/2022q3/muxup-implementation-notes#site-generation https://muxup.com/2022q3/muxup-implementation-notes#site-gen....

powersnail 4y ago

Love Hugo. Been using Hugo for quite some time. But I agree with the author that there is a "Running hugo server -D now!!! ... Where is it!!!!" problem when following the tutorial. Hugo has many "magic" based on names, "index.md" vs "_index.md", template look up hierarchy, global variables and functions (sometimes capitalized, sometimes not; some are behind a context, some are not), etc. It's hard to tell what name is required, what is configurable, and what is just accident, until you've delved into the detailed documentation. And to make the matter more complicated, themes sometimes use name magics, too. I also hope that Hugo can just allow piping stuff through external programs in its templates. Right now, Hugo provides a pretty large number of APIs on resource transformation, regexes, string manipulation, and hell, you can even download stuff in templates. But to be honest, it's way easier to just write a shell script. If I were to make my own static site generator, I think I'd probably opt for less flexibility, and simpler logic, especially with regard to what file ends up where. Let the generator handle the basic MD->HTML transformation, the skeleton of the site, producing feeds and metadata. And let external programs handle everything else.

BeetleB 4y ago

Or just use Pelican.

marcosdumay 4y ago
I started using Zola (Hugo's clone in Rust) when Pelican stopped being something I was able to use. Is it still maintained? Because all I got were incompatibilities with the newer Python versions.
- BeetleB 4y ago
  I never had issues with Python versions - I occasionally had issues with newer Pelican versions (backward incompatibilities). It continues to work for me - been using it for over a decade.

_def 4y ago

I recently started a blog again with Hugo and I like how you can easily use a github workflow to build and deploy it. This way you can even just use github in your browser to publish.

simplyinfinity 4y ago

I just started using Hugo, but boy, are the docs bad... and I mean REAL BAD. It took me an HOUR to setup a theme. Then another 30 mins to realize I've set up the theme the wrong way, using a git submodule, instead of a go module. Then installation of the go module itself took another 30 mins of debugging, because nothing was working out of the box. And nowhere in the documentations are things explained for novices. The docs are written in a way that assumes you already know Hugo's ins and outs. uh... At this point, I would've been better off with a WordPress install that takes 5 minutes to do manually.

crecker 4y ago
Bep is rewriting the docs because are really incomprehensible. I do agree with you.
- yawpitch 4y ago
  Four years ago Bep was rewriting the docs because they were incomprehensible (https://yawpitchroll.com/posts/hugo-probably-is-not-for-you/)… https://yawpitchroll.com/posts/hugo-probably-is-not-for-you/... last week I started looking again, and I wouldn’t say anything has improved, nor do I expect it to in 4 more.
  - pooper 4y ago
    Note to reader: the link is mangled up a little I think because of the closing parentheses? Here is a link without parentheses https://yawpitchroll.com/posts/hugo-probably-is-not-for-you/ https://yawpitchroll.com/posts/hugo-probably-is-not-for-you/
mhb 4y ago
Is there a good alternative? Would be nice if it is in Python. Maybe Pelican, Nikola, Hyde?
- antihero 4y ago
  Astro is pretty awesome if you’re ok with TS/JS.

hiAndrewQuinn 4y ago

Moi, OP here. Thanks for stopping by this post and sharing your thoughts. I have nothing to sell, but I am looking for mentors. Let me know if you have knowledge worth passing down.

Arch-TK 4y ago

It took me an afternoon to glue together my own DIY SSG with all the features I wanted. I did that after a previous SSG didn't do what I wanted and I didn't know how to fix it since I don't know ruby. An SSG especially is such a low-risk project. Probably the most carefree code you could possibly write.

amai 4y ago

Hugo is not made for minimum viable blogs. Its advantage in performance only becomes important for bigger websites or blogs with thousands of articles. But especially for bigger websites it should be possible to auto-generate a good archive. However the developers of Hugo stubbornly refuse to fix this very important 8 year old issue: https://github.com/gohugoio/hugo/issues/448 https://github.com/gohugoio/hugo/issues/448 That is quite unfortunate, because it makes Hugo "the worlds fastest framework for building huge websites without a useful archive".

frosted-flakes 4y ago
It doesn't sound like the Hugo developer (bep) "stubbornly refuses" to fix that issue. It's on the roadmap, after all. Rather, it sounds like it's simply not a high priority task, and other things have taken up his time. It is a free product, after all.
- amai 4y ago
  It's on the roadmap since 8 years. But the problem I have with this free kind of software is that they claim on their website " The world's fastest framework for websites". That generates some expectations. They don't claim "the world's slowest hobby project, written by people in their spare time for no money." So it shouldn't be a surprise that people get disappointed, if important features are missing from "the world's fastest framework".

thenoblesunfish 4y ago

I tried to make a minimal Hugo site just a few days ago. There is a quickstart on their website, which I followed, and it seemed to work as expected. Did I get lucky? Am I in for a world of pain as I try to go beyond the extremely minimal site I have now?

hendry 4y ago

Made similar work here https://dabase.com/e/04066/ https://dabase.com/e/04066/

falkensmaz3 4y ago

I swear folks. Take an hour and read the docs carefully. It’s not difficult to get a scratch site up and running with Hugo. The obsession with “mean time to dopamine” is exhausting.

ninefoxgambit 4y ago

I've always found Hugo easy to get running. Compared to Jekyll, Hugo was always much easier as Jekyll always seemed to throw up some Ruby or Bundler issue every time you went back to it. I've built a lot of Hugo sites and templates, I have 10+ open source themes at https://github.com/zerostaticthemes https://github.com/zerostaticthemes so here are my main observations of Hugo * The docs do need a lot of work, but the forums and stack overflow are pretty reliable sources with Hugo having enough critical mass to get answers for even obscure errors and questions. * Hugos big problem is the Go templating language. It's arcane and unintuitive. Even after years I still find myself forgetting how to do and or conditionals. * Hugos template lookup order is opinionated but one of it's strengths. * Hugos . context is opinionated but also one of it's strengths. If you are looking for a minimal SSG then I think it's important that it's HTML based (so no Nextjs or Gatsby) - Jekyll, Hugo and 11ty are the main options in this space but there is also a wave of new options which seem worth considering. There is a great list of ssgs over at www.staticgen.com if you want to browse the up and comers.