Running a blog with Hugo and GitHub Pages

When I started this blog, I wanted to make a post of how I set it up. The time has come! Although I have to say, I kind of forgot what my pain points were initially, but I remember that I tried using “pure” GitHub Pages and Jekyll, and with both of them I wasn’t happy.

What I wanted was:

• publishing by git
• posts as markdown
• a simple way to preview posts and the blog before publishing

My solution now is using Hugo, another popular static site generator written in go. I really like the setup because it’s quite simple to get started and to maintain. Basically the steps to get going are:

• Install Hugo and create a site
• This creates a directory containing all the files; create a git repo and push it to GitHub
• Set GitHub Actions as the source for GitHub Pages in the repo settings
• Add the Hugo workflow by GitHub Actions

And you’re done! Now you can use hugo to build the site, and if you commit and push the changes, the site gets updated. This includes editing blog posts in GitHub directly. Also, hugo server can be used to easily serve the content locally to get a feel for it or creating/editing themes.

Note that your repo has to be public if you don’t want to pay for using GitHub Pages. I still have to figure out some configuration and a nice theme, but this is a nice way to go forward.

By the way, I noticed that it’s way easier for me to just sit down and write/draft blog posts in the note taking tool of my choice (which is currently Joplin) instead of worrying about how the blog works.