Hugo from zero to hero

This is the meta-post. The post about how to build your own blog. I will use Hugo and a Linux machine.

Prerequisites

We need:

• Git
• Hugo

Install git

Verify if git is installed.

git --version

If the command is not found, install it.

I am using Debian, so I’ll run:

apt-get install git
add-apt-repository ppa:git-core/ppa
apt update; apt install git

Install Hugo

Verify if Hugo is installed. I am using v0.164.

hugo version

If the command is not found, install it.

I am using Debian, so I’ll download this file and run:

sudo dpkg -i ~/Downloads/hugo_0.164.0_linux-amd64.deb

Create a GitHub repository

This post is not just about creating a local blog, but also hosting it and having it published for everyone to see. For that, we will be using GitHub Pages.

If you don’t already have a GitHub account, create it.

Create a new repository and name it like this: <your_username>.github.io. This specific naming will tell GitHub that this repository will be deployed and published.

You can add your own description. I didn’t add a README and I chose GNU’s license. The repo needs to be public.

Hit create, now you have your new repository for your blog. This is mine.

Now you need to get your repository URL, click on Codeand copy the Clone URL, which should look like https://github.com/<your_username>/<your_username>.github.io.git.

Open a terminal in your PC (hopefully you are using Linux) and create a directory where the repository will be cloned.

git clone <YOUR_CLONE_URL>

Now change your directory to the repository

cd <your_username>.github.io`

Hugo won’t let you create a project in a directory that is not empty, so we will create a new project in a subdirectory and then move it back

hugo new project test
cp -r test .
rm -rf test

We can add a theme now, but we will leave it for later.

You can create a new page with

hugo new content <PATH>/<FILENAME>.md

By default all new content gets created as a draft, so don’t forget to change that.

Or copy the content from this repo to get started faster.

Now run the server and click on the URL from the command output

hugo server

We will need the deployment script for the GitHub Action. [1]

Create a workflow file

mkdir .github/workflows
editor .github/workflows/hugo.yaml

And copy the content from here.

Next, add the following snippet to the hugo.toml file in the site root directory

You can customise now the content, or leave as it is for now, and then can commit and push the changes to your repository

git add .
git commit -m "My first personal blog"
git push

GitHub will run the workflow and publish the page