In this guide I'm going to explain how you can build your own blog using a tool called Hugo and then put it online. You don't need any previous experience to follow along, just a willingness to learn.

I think Hugo is a great alternative to Wordpress and site builders like Squarespace or Wix. Although there can be more of a learning curve, in return you get much more control, flexibility and ownership over your blog. I'll go into more detail on the differences in this guide.

Even if you're not very technical I think you'd wrap your head around the basics within a day or less.

By the end of this guide you'll have built a basic blog and put it online. This is what the finished product will look like.

If you hit a snag in the tutorial and can't figure it out feel free to drop me an email and I'll do my best to help.

If you're interested, you can find the source code for this tutorial here.

Contents

What is Hugo?

Hugo is a static site generator. It's a tool which combines a bunch of files and turns them into HTML, CSS and JavaScript files. Or in other words it uses these files to generate a static site.

Normally the files you write are markdown files for pages and blog posts, as well as configuration files and HTML templates.

Markdown is a markup language that's much simpler to use and read than HTML. For example typing **this** produces bold text like this. You can find out more using this cheatsheet

You can think of a static site generator as a compromise between between a static site and a content management system (CMS) like WordPress or Ghost.

Why not just write HTML, CSS and JavaScript files?

Easier to learn

If you're learning from scratch there's a lot less to learn with static site generators. Markdown is easier to pick up than HTML and you can use preconfigured templates or themes.

If you're learning from scratch there's a lot less to learn with static site generators. Markdown is easier to pick up than HTML and you can use preconfigured templates or themes. Less repetition

With a static HTML site bits that are the same in different pages have to be repeated. For example you have to insert the top menu into every page. If you change the menu, you have to change it in every page. Hugo takes care of that for you. You will only have to change the menu in one place and Hugo will do the rest.

With a static HTML site bits that are the same in different pages have to be repeated. For example you have to insert the top menu into every page. If you change the menu, you have to change it in every page. Hugo takes care of that for you. You will only have to change the menu in one place and Hugo will do the rest. Plugins and themes galore!

Hugo makes it very easy to use plugins and themes. If someone else has figured out the solution to your problem, or made a very pretty blog, you can easily use that.

Why not use a CMS like WordPress or Ghost?

Uses less resources

A content management system runs a lot of code on the server. In comparison, the server for a static site only has to serve the content. This means you can spend less money on the server (and more on coffee). Better for your wallet and the environment!

A content management system runs a lot of code on the server. In comparison, the server for a static site only has to serve the content. This means you can spend less money on the server (and more on coffee). Better for your wallet and the environment! Simpler to manage

CMS' have a lot of moving parts. If you've ever tried to manage your own wordpress install, you've probably run into database issues, incompatible PHP versions and baffling errors that suddenly appear out of nowhere. It can be hard to figure out where the problem came from with so many moving parts. Not to mention the difficulty of figuring out how to do backups and restores when databases are involved. There's a lot less points of failure with a tool like Hugo, and because there's no database backing up can be as simple as copying the files.

CMS' have a lot of moving parts. If you've ever tried to manage your own wordpress install, you've probably run into database issues, incompatible PHP versions and baffling errors that suddenly appear out of nowhere. It can be hard to figure out where the problem came from with so many moving parts. Not to mention the difficulty of figuring out how to do backups and restores when databases are involved. There's a lot less points of failure with a tool like Hugo, and because there's no database backing up can be as simple as copying the files. Easier access to your data

If you're not technical and you are using WordPress it can be difficult to interact with your data from outside the administration area. Figuring out where your posts are stored or trying to recover them after a server failure can be daunting tasks. Even worse, popular site builders like SquareSpace and Wix don't even offer the functionality to export the site you worked so hard to build. It's your data, your work, your creativity, shouldn't you get to own and control that?

Installation

On the Hugo website there's a big list of all the ways you can install it. I'll go over the basic methods for Linux, Windows and Mac.

Linux

You can use snap to install Hugo on Linux. Snap comes pre-installed on Ubuntu, and if you're using a distribution based on Ubuntu or Debian you can install snap by opening a terminal and typing the following:

sudo apt update sudo apt install snapd

Checkout this page if you need more information about how to install snap on your specific distribution.

After that you can use snap to install Hugo with this command:

snap install hugo

Windows

This is a complete video guide to installing Hugo on Windows.

Or if you prefer text instructions, you first need to head over to this releases page and find the first file that ends in either Windows-32bit.zip or Windows-64bit.zip . Check this page out if you're not sure whether your computer is 32-bit or 64-bit. (But it's probably 64-bit.)

After extracting the zip file, you should find a hugo.exe file. In your C:\ drive, create a folder named Hugo and inside that create a folder named bin .

Now, copy the hugo.exe to C:\Hugo\bin . Your file structure should look like this:

C: └─Hugo └─bin └─hugo.exe

Next you'll need to open the Control Panel, click on Advanced Setting then the Environment Variables button at the bottom of that tab.

Select the Path variable and click edit. Then click the New button and type in C:\Hugo\bin . After that OK out of all the windows.

To test it works open the command prompt by clicking the windows key and starting to type the word command, it should appear.

After opening it, type the following:

hugo version

If everything is working fine the hugo version should appear.

MacOS

You can install Hugo on Mac using a tool called homebrew which you can install from the terminal. To open the terminal use the Cmd + Space keyboard shortcut to open Spotlight. From here type the word Terminal and open the app that shows up.

Now to install homebrew, type the following into your terminal:

/usr/bin/ruby -e " $( curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/master/install ) "

After that is intalled you can install Hugo by typing the following:

brew install hugo

You can check whether or not it's installed by typing hugo version in the terminal. If it's installed fine, the version should appear.

A quick word about the command line

If you've made it through the installation section you've come across the command line. On Mac and Linux it's called the 'Terminal', on Windows it's the 'Command Prompt' or 'Powershell'.

Don't worry if you've never used it before, it's not as scary as it seems. Instead of interacting with your computer by pointing at and clicking things, you do it by typing commands. No need to learn any commands in advance, just follow along!

Setting the stage

First of all, you want to decide where your hugo site will be stored on your computer. You might just decide to put it in your documents folder and name it something like my-blog . Or you might create a folder in your home directory called websites or blogs and store your blog(s) there. For the sake of this tutorial, I'm going with the second option.

The home directory is where all your personal files are stored. It includes your Documents folder, your Desktop folder and quite a few other folders. On Windows this folder is C:\Users\<your-username> , on Linux it's /home/<your-username> and on MacOS it's /Users/<your-username> . By default the command line opens in the home directory. From the command line, check which directory you're by using the pwd (print working directory) command on Linux/Mac or the chdir (check directory) command on Windows.

Open up your command line, which should by default be in the home directory, and type in the following commands.

mkdir websites cd websites

The first command creates a folder ( mkdir as in 'make directory') called websites and the second command moves you into that folder ( cd as in 'change directory').

Now you're ready to make your hugo site. From the command line, type in this command:

hugo new site my-blog

This will create a folder called my-blog which contains the files and folders that will generate your blog. Before you can see the blog though, you'll need to add a theme.

Installing a theme

Before you can have a look at your site, you'll need to install a theme. Hugo has a huge selection of themes, so hopefully you'll find a few that you like.

For this tutorial I'm going to use the anubis theme, which is a very simple theme for blogs. Download it from this link and extract the file. After extracting, you should get a folder called hugo-theme-anubis-master , rename this folder to anubis , and move it into themes folder inside my-blog .

During the rest of this guide when I talk about a folder by saying something like my-blog/content that means the content folder inside the my-blog folder.

Here's what the my-blog folder should look like:

my-blog ├── archetypes ├── config.toml ├── content ├── data ├── layouts ├── resources ├── static └── themes └── anubis

Inside the my-blog folder you'll find a file called config.toml . Open this configuration file with a text editor like gedit or notepad. This is what it'll look like:

baseURL = "http://example.org/" languageCode = "en-us" title = "My New Hugo Site"

You'll need to add a new line for the theme, and whilst you're here you may as well change the title. You want to end up with a config.toml file that looks like this:

baseURL = "http://example.org/" languageCode = "en-us" title = "The Coolest Blog" theme = "anubis"

You're now ready to have your first look at your site! In the command line, you need to navigate to the my-blog folder. If you've just opened the command line and you're in the home directory, use this command to change the directory:

cd websites/my-blog

Now run this command to run your blog:

hugo server -D

This is what it should look like when you run the command:

This command line window is now running a Hugo server. Head over to your browser and go to http://localhost:1313/ to view your blog.

Unfortunately, without any pages, it's quite boring to look at. Let's fix that.

Your first hugo page

Open a new command line window (you need to keep the other one running so you can see updates when they happen to your site.) Like you did earlier, navigate to the my-blog folder:

cd websites/my-blog

Now, run this command to create a new post:

hugo new posts/my-first-post.md

If you head to your browser, you should see that this empty post has been added.

Use your file explorer to open up the my-blog/content/posts/ folder. Inside you'll find a file called my-first-post.md , which you created with the command used earlier. Open this file up with a text editor, it will look a bit like this:

--- title : "My First Post" date : draft : true ---

What you see here is called frontmatter, specifically this is YAML frontmatter. This is information about the post that's not post content. You can also add other metadata options to the frontmatter such as tags, categories or a summary.

Below the three dashes is where you'll add your content, try adding the following below the three dashes:

This is my first post in my exciting blogging journey! # My main heading It's so * exciting * writing my first ** hugo ** blog post. ## A smaller heading * Wow these bullets are way easier than HTML bullets! * Enough writing, let's see what it looks like!

Save the file, then check your browser to see what it looks like:

Click the post title to navigate to the post page. You should see http://localhost:1313/posts/my-first-post/ in your browser URL bar.

Use this markdown cheatsheet to play around with your page and add some content.

Although using a plain text editor works fine, it'll probably make your life easier to look into an editor with markdown support. Typora, Mark Text and ghostwriter are all specialised markdown editors. Most code editors like Notepad++ and VSCodium have plugins that support markdown.

Changing the summary

Now you've got the bones of a blog, but you may have noticed that the formatting of the post summary on the homepage isn't all that great. All the content is showing up, without any of the formatting!

Although it looks like it's all the text, it's actually the first ~70 words, it's just that your first post has less than that so it shows all the text.

Let's create a new post to play around with these content summaries.

hugo new posts/summaries.md

Put some nonsense text in your summaries.md file. Here's what my file looks like:

--- title: "Summaries" date: 2020-02-27T14:54:52Z draft: true --- That was Wintermute, manipulating the lock the way it had manipulated the drone micro and the dripping chassis of a broken mirror bent and elongated as they fell. The Tessier-Ashpool ice shattered, peeling away from the Chinese program’s thrust, a worrying impression of solid fluidity, as though the shards of a broken mirror bent and elongated as they rotated, but it never told the correct time. Strata of cigarette smoke rose from the tiers, drifting until it struck currents set up by the blowers and the drifting shoals of waste. No sound but the muted purring of the bright void beyond the chain link. Now this quiet courtyard, Sunday afternoon, this girl with a random collection of European furniture, as though Deane had once intended to use the place as his home. Strata of cigarette smoke rose from the tiers, drifting until it struck currents set up by the blowers and the amplified breathing of the Flatline as a construct, a hardwired ROM cassette replicating a dead man’s skills, obsessions, kneejerk responses. Now this quiet courtyard, Sunday afternoon, this girl with a random collection of European furniture, as though Deane had once intended to use the place as his home.

After checking it out in the browser you can see the summary doesn't contain the whole text.

Still, it would be better if you could have more control over the summary. Sometimes an excerpt might be fine, but like you saw with the first post, it can look a bit mangled. To control the summary you can use the <!--more--> summary divider. Add the following to your summaries.md file, under the frontmatter but before the nonsense text:

In this post I will be exploring summaries in my hugo blog.

After saving the file, this is what you'll see this in the browser:

Dope!

Before we move on, let's add a summary to the first post. This time instead of using the summary divider we'll add it to the frontmatter. This is the frontmatter for my-first-post.md right now:

--- title : "My First Post" date : draft : true ---

Now we'll add a line for the summary at the end:

--- title : "My First Post" date : draft : true summary : The coolest blog post in the universe ---

After saving you'll see this in your browser:

Having control over the summary is great, but having to remember exactly how to type <!--more--> , or more likely, having to copy and paste it each time, could be a pain. Thankfully, Hugo let's us change what the default post looks like.

Editing the default post

Whenever you use the hugo new command, the markdown file it creates is based on the markdown file inside my-blog/archetypes/default.md .

Here's what that file looks like:

--- title: "{{ replace .Name "-" " " | title }}" date: {{ .Date }} draft: true ---

If you ignore all the weird curly brackets, it looks a bit like what posts look like when you first create them. If you wanted to you could change the frontmatter. You may not want posts to be drafts by default, or might want to add tags or categories to the frontmatter.

Feel free to play around this, for now though we'll just change it a tiny bit by adding the summary divider:

--- title: "{{ replace .Name "-" " " | title }}" date: {{ .Date }} draft: true ---

Now, whenever you create a new post with the hugo new comand, it'll already have a summary section in it. Let's try it out:

hugo new posts/featured-image.md

Open up the featured-image.md file, and you'll see it already has the summary divider:

--- title: "Featured Image" date: 2020-02-27T16:49:05Z draft: true ---

Now we can add an image to our post!

Adding an image

Some Hugo themes come with an option for adding feature images. The way it's done depends on the theme. Some hugo themes will let you add it to the frontmatter, for other themes you create a folder for your post that contains an image called feature.jpg or something like that. For this tutorial I wanted to keep things as simple as possible, so the theme I picked doesn't have that option.

You can get the same functionality using the <!--more--> summary divider.

Find an image you like, you can use a site like pexels if you don't have anything you want to use on your computer. To make things easier for yourself give the image a simple name. I've called mine forest.jpg . Copy this file into the my-blog/static folder. You should end up with a folder structure like this:

my-blog └── static └── forest.jpg

Any file you put inside the static folder will end up on the root of your website. So if your website was my-blog.com you could access forest.jpg by going to my-blog.com/forest.jpg

Now, add the image to your featured-image.md by adding this line above the summary divider.

![](/forest.jpg)

After saving your blog will look something like this. (I also added a little summary line to my file)

You can also add images to your post that aren't hosted on your site. In the featured-image.md file, try adding this line below the summary divider:

![](https://images.pexels.com/photos/459225/pexels-photo-459225.jpeg?auto=compress&cs=tinysrgb&dpr=2&h=650&w=940)

Save the file and head to your browser. Click on the title of the Featured Image post to navigate to that page. It should look like this:

I've mentioned it a couple times, but Hugo by default lets you organise your posts into tags and categories. Let's add some to the featured-image.md file. Change the frontmatter so it looks like this:

--- title : "Featured Image" date : draft : true categories : - "photography" tags : - "nature-photo" - "forest-photo" ---

After saving you'll need to restart the hugo server -D command for the tag and category pages to be generated.

To do that open the command line where you first typed that command and type Ctrl + C . This stops the server. Now, enter the command hugo server -D to start the server again.

Now, when you open your web browser, the feature image post will look like this:

You can click on any of these tags or categories, which will take you to a page with all the posts in that section.

If you'd like to add one your categories or tags to your menu, you can do it by adding the following to the config.toml file:

[menu] [[menu.main]] name = "Photography" url = "/categories/photography"

Note that some themes may require a different syntax to this. The theme's page should tell you what syntax to use. After editing and saving the configuration file, the heading will look like this:

Adding an about page

To add an about page, create a file called about.md inside the my-blog/content folder. You don't need to use the hugo new command for this as you don't need any of the frontmatter that is in the default file. You can create the file from your file explorer, or from your text editor.

Add some text like this to it, and save it:

# About Me I'm just a really cool dude, y'know.

Now from your browser you can head to http://localhost:1313/about/ and you'll see this:

Just like before, you can add it to the menu by editing the configuration file. Edit the menu section of the config.toml file, like so:

[menu] [[menu.main]] name = "Photography" url = "/categories/photography" weight = 1 [[menu.main]] name = "About" url = "/about" weight = 2

Adding the weight option lets you control the order. It seems to default to alphabetical order otherwise.

Now the menu section should like this:

Putting it online

There are a lot of ways to publish your blog. I tried to pick the method that requires the least amount of tools, accounts, and money. But it's not necessarily the most ideal method. Check out hugo's page on deployment for more methods.

Before going through the steps to put it online open each of three posts you created, delete the draft: true line, and save the file. Any post that has this line won't be published.

Open up github and create an account. By the end of this part of the tutorial the website will be hosted on <your-github-username>.github.io so pick the username based on that.

After confirming your email, you'll be taken to a page that looks like this:

Now open the config.toml file (this is the last time, I promise!) and change the baseURL option so it looks like this:

baseURL = "https://<your-github-username>.github.io"

Instead of <your-github-username> enter the actual username you're using. So for me this would be https://ibby-hugo-tutorial.github.io . After you've made the change, save the file and close it.

For the repository name, enter <your-github-username>.github.io , for me this would be ibby-hugo-tutorial.github.io . After that click the Create repository button.

On the next page that appears select upload an existing file :

Now head over to your command line window and exit the Hugo server by typing Ctrl + C . Now type in the following command and hit enter:

hugo --minify

Now in your file explorer, open up the my-blog/public folder. Select all the files in there and drag them into the github upload page:

After the files have uploaded it will look this:

Click the Commit changes button.

After the files have finished processing, you can head to https://<your-github-username>.github.io to see your blog! Here's mine.

Updating your site

Whenever you want to update your site just repeat the same steps. Use the hugo --minify command to generate the static site, open the public folder and upload it to github. You'll find the upload button on the repository page:

What's next?

You could learn the basics of git, this will open up other publishing options for you like now or netlify. It'll also let you streamline the process of publishing to github pages so that all it takes is a single command from the command line. As mentioned earlier in this tutorial, you may want to look into a specialised markdown editor like Mark Text. This will be a lot nicer for editing markdown files. You could also look into a code editor like VSCodium. This will let edit all your website files from one place, and it has great markdown plugins. Find a theme you like and use it instead of anubis. Make sure you read the page for the theme to find the right way to configure it. Each theme is configure slightly differently, but now that you have the basics down it won't be too confusing! Get your own domain from a provider like namecheap and point it to your blog.

Thanks for reading!

I hope you found it helpful. If you have any questions or feedback don't hesitate to drop me an email.

And if you like my content, consider supporting me using one of the methods on that page. It helps me keep making content.