This post describes the creation process of this website. I have used the popular static site generator Hugo. Hugo is based on the language go. Disclaimer: this is the second time I am creating my website using Hugo. But the last time I created this was in 2015, so a lot has changed.
Installing Hugo on Windows 10
My recommendation is to use Chocolatey to install Hugo although there are binaries available at github for direct installation. If Chocolatey is installed on your system, open powershell by right clicking the start button. There type
chococ install hugo
to install Hugo. Now are ready to use Hugo commands from the powershell. To check if the installtion went well type hugo version. It will display the current version of Hugo.
Using Hugo
One way to quickly learn how to use Hugo is to follow the quickstart guide over at the Hugo website. There is one problem, with the echo command, I encountered while applying it on Windows 10. For completeness I will describe all the steps involved.
We begin by creating a directory with the necessary structure for our website. I stated by creating a practice folder called quickstart using
hugo new site quickstart
Then type
cd quickstart
to move into the newly created directory.
Next we add a theme to our website. We will add the Ananke theme using git.
git init
git submodule add https://github.com/budparr/gohugo-theme-ananke.git themes/ananke
More themes are available at themes.hugo.io. If you don’t have git installed you can also download the themes from there, and extract the compressed folder into the themes folder in your site’s directory. Using git is higly recommended.
Take a look in the themes folder in your site’s directory. There should be a folder named ananke inside. Go back to the quickstart directory and open the config.toml file in your faourite text editor. I am using Atom. Add
theme = "ananke"
to the end of your config file.
Now your website is essentially ready. Let’s add our first post. Type the following command on the powershell
hugo new posts/my-first-post.md
This will create a markdownfile named my-first-post.md in the content>posts. Open it in a text editor. You will notice that the file already contains the following:
---
title: "My First Post"
date: 2021-02-27T16:42:29+05:30
draft: true
---
The title is going to be the title of your blog post, date is the time when your file was created, and ‘draft’ represents whether or no your post is published. Change draft to false when you are happy with the content.
Even when draft is set to true, you can see how it will look on you website by typing the folloing in the powershell.
hugo server -D
image
Click on the link displayed to see the current status of your website. Make your changes. Once you are happy with your changes, build your site by typing the following in your powershell
hugo
Your website is published in the public folder in your website directory.