This will be the first post in a short series about getting started with hugo. By the end of this you will have a dead simple proof of concept site which we will build on in later posts.

Next in this series

• Getting Started Hugo 2 of 3
• Getting Started Hugo 3 of 3

Static site generators such as Hugo are great for sites that don’t have any particular reason for dynamic (database driven) content; or for simple sites where the ‘dynamic’ content you do have rarely changes.

For my site, using a static site generator is ideal as the content itself can be hosted on platforms such as Github Pages Azure Blob Storage; and is relatively straight forward to add content. I don’t want to deal with things like frameworks, databases, security, all I want to do is serve up hypertext and css so out of pure laziness and an endless number of my own blogging-frameworks (all of which will never reach the light of github) because lets face it KISS and YAGNI.

This site is hosted on Github; mostly known for the hosting of Git Repositories, I wanted something simple which automated the publishing of changes (this is where Github Pages comes in), easily configurable with a custom domain and preferably a ssl free certificate, so here we go.

Setup on Windows via Chocklaty

There are lots of ways to get Hugo setup; my preference is to use Chocklaty.

Get Chocklaty installed : or just run this random script form the interwebs

"%SystemRoot%\System32\WindowsPowerShell\v1.0\powershell.exe" _ 
  -NoProfile _
  -InputFormat None _ 
  -ExecutionPolicy Bypass _ 
  -Command "iex ((New-Object System.Net.WebClient).DownloadString('https://chocolatey.org/install.ps1'))" _
    && SET "PATH=%PATH%;%ALLUSERSPROFILE%\chocolatey\bin"

Install Hugo

choco install hugo -confirm

Or if you want SASS/SCSS

choco install hugo-extended -confirm

My First site

So now the bits are installed its time for hello-world mainly because of the instant gratification.

Pick a Hugo Theme, Personally I chose hugo-future-imperfect-slim which we will use in this demo.

Drop into a Terminal, punch in the bits below

# new directory
hugo new site instant-gratification
cd instant-gratification

# actually a git repository (hugo modules are git-submodules)
git init

# install chosen theme
git submodule add https://github.com/pacollins/hugo-future-imperfect-slim.git themes/hugo-future-imperfect-slim
git submodule init
git submodule update

Copy the bits from .\instant-gratification\themes\hugo-future-imperfect-slim\exampleSite into \instant-gratification

# generate the site with the selected theme and serve it
hugo server -t hugo-future-imperfect-slim

That last line will run the server; and spin you up on a localhost port; hit that endpoint with your web browser and experience

Figure 1

Next time we will apply some customisations to the site.