This Site & Discovering Hugo

2 July 2021 , 2 minute read.

This website of mine is set up using the static site generator Hugo. Meaning there are no fancy, slow scripts running in the back-end when you open a page. Further, it’s markdown, it’s fast and it’s mighty. It offers a lot of themes and customization and a very clean content management system. The fact, that I’m writing this in markdown and it is shown as a website is very satisfying, in my opinion.

Getting Started with Hugo

The Hugo Documentation is pretty detailed and extensive and you find everything you need to get started here.

After installation, to setup a basic website, all you need to do is running this command hugo new site sitename. To run a development server, run hugo serve -D and to build the page simple run hugo in the directory of the site. Or just check out the CLI Doc.

Now, to customize, there are many things you can do. The major settings are found in the config.toml, like the site title or menu setup. To change the appearance, you can download a theme and add it to the themes folder and also set it in the config.

My Site

I use the Black & Light Theme and adjusted it a bit to meet my needs. The forked repository can be found here. So far, the website does not contain a lot. Blog posts, an about page with my resume and a now page with what I am currently doing.

To guarantee a smooth workflow, I set up a GitHub action on the repository of the website, that builds and deploys it on my VPS. Whenever I push something on the main branch, the procedure is triggered and my website is up to date, automatically. Check out the actions-hugo workflow for GitHub Actions.

I plan to further explore Hugo, as there are many more features it offers that might end up on this site. However, for now it’s quite a neat little nest for my stuff.