🤷🏼♂️ Why I Switched to Hugo
Last weekend I converted my website (the one you’re looking at) to the Hugo Static Website Engine. If you don’t already know, a static website engine converts a directory structure of (usually) Markdown files to a set of HTML files that can be uploaded to a static web server like Surge.sh.
I’ve grown fond of Hugo over the past few days so I thought share a few of the things I like and dislike about it. Let start with the things I like…
What I Like About Hugo
Before Hugo, I was using an engine that I built myself called Balloon. Balloon worked great up until this point, it won’t be able to do some of the more advanced things I’m looking to implement soon. That’s where Hugo comes in.
There are a few main reasons why I switched to Hugo.
1⁄3 – Installation
One of the reasons why I didn’t go with [Jekyll]() (perhaps the most popular static engine) is because I didn’t want to deal with installation and setup of Ruby. Since Hugo
2⁄3 – Build and Reload Performance
Compiling my entire collection of over 100 blog posts went from taking five seconds half of a
second. Also, Hugo’s watch capability is usually able to reload the browser with my changes
before I can even ⌘ Tab back to the browser!
$> time hugo Started building site 0 of 1 draft rendered 0 future content 105 pages created 0 non-page files copied 22 paginator pages created 0 tags created in 247 ms
3⁄3 – Flexible Categorization
Hugo has powerful categorization built in. All it takes to tag and categorize a post is the addition of some metadata at the top of the post. You can even create your own taxonomies if you want to group posts based on something unique like what programming language it relates to.
--- title: "Why I Switched to Hugo" slug: "why-i-switched-to-hugo" date: 2016-07-30T15:58:51-07:00 tags: ["Development", "Blogging"] language: ["Go"] menu: "Best Blog Posts" --- This is [Markdown](https://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/).
What I Dislike About Hugo
My complaints on Hugo are mostly about poor onboarding and don’t really bother me now that I’ve spent a few days learning it, but here they are anyway.
- error messages are not very descriptive (debugging user error is hard)
- the documentation is hard to navigate (huge accordion sidebar)
- themes are low quality (I ripped the logic out of one and started over)
- Go template syntax is weird, but I’m getting used to it
- conf written in the obscure TOML, but also supports
YAMLandJSON
Wrap Up
Hugo is a great static engine for the technical blogger. I hit a few hurdles in the beginning, but after learning a few basic concepts and developing a custom theme it’s been a pleasure to use and I’m sure it will be for a long time.