Hugo Extended Setup

Sun, 12 May 2024 13:03:46 -0600

Now that I’m on the other side of the daunting task of setting up Hugo and making an extensible enough theme, I figure I can share what I’ve done and learned.

My Design process

While envisioning what I wanted out of this, here is the process of selection and implementation.

My Objectives

When setting out to make this, I wanted a few simple things:

A simple way to write and publish posts.
Flexibility to change my mind on how things are organized.
Enough css control to really make it look how I want.

My Tech Selections

So from those objectives a few things I knew already or wanted to learn more about stood out:

Getting Started with Hugo

Sat, 11 May 2024 07:56:16 +0000

Holy Crap

Hugo docs are worse than I recall. This literally took me 3 or 4 hours. In the end the quickstart is beyond useless, to the point of harmful.

Just use the custom theme option to start and learn to make your own themes.

Here’s my quickstart

Install Hugo’s binary
Create a new site with hugo new site whatever
When it asks about theme, just say to make a custom one.
set that theme in the hugo.toml
make a test post with hugo new posts/test.md (or whatever you want to call your content type)

Now you’ll have a super basic site. Customize the theme to your liking, I went with a tailwind integration which was a bit involved. You could do something similar or juse use dfirect css.