My Hugo setup and how this blog works

This week I did a stream to document how I use hugo, the static site generator, for this blog that you’re reading right now!

The point of the stream was to show how I use this tool, but all of this is really not a good starting point if you are looking to get started with hugo, or you just want to see how it works. For that, I’d recommend checking out the hugo quick start documentation!

The stream was about an hour and I talked a bit about why I use a static site generator for my blog, why specifically hugo, and how I use it on Reclaim Hosting. I go into more detail in the video, but basically I use GitHub to sync the files for my website, and then a script to SSH into the server and build my site. I also dove into the tools I use for this:

• a GitHub repository for file syncing and backup
• a text editor for writing Markdown
• I use Visual Studio Code most often, and that what I demo in the video. I like it because it’s a powerful text editor, but I can also manage files, use the terminal, and install extensions to give it more functionality.
• Sometimes if I want a simpler editor to focus just on writing, I use Typora. I didn’t demo Typora, but the fact that my blog posts are written in Markdown means I can use just about any Text Editor, which I really dig.
• I also didn’t demo this in the stream, but on the occasions that I find my self blogging from my phone or iPad, I use Working Copy, or sometimes Taio
• a few scripts that really speed up my workflow. They mainly fall into the categories of file-management shortcuts, or scripts that help me remember terminal commands
• post (make a new blog post)
• draft (make a new draft blog post)
• journal (make a new journal post)
• serve (start the hugo server so I can preview the site)
• publish (SSH into the server and call the build script)
• build (the script that updates the site, runs on the server and is called the publish script)

Other than the workflow stuff I also briefly touch on the fact that because I use Git for this, I also have a built in backup system that lets me revert changes if I need to. It also means the back-end of the site itself is public and anyone can look at the repository for it. I suppose I could have made it a private repository, but seeing as the site itself is public, why not make the back-end public too?

I mentioned it in the stream, but I’d also highly recommend D’Arcy Norman’s posts on hugo as they have been helpful to me as I created a workflow for myself.