Hugo – Golang static site editor
gohugo.io
gohugo.io
My pros and cons of Hugo:
+ It's fast.
+ Like, really, really fast. I'm looking at <1s builds for a couple thousand pages which took around 5-8s in Pelican.
+ A lot of really nice out-of-the-box stuff like markdownifying arbitrary strings, rss and sitemaps, etc.
+ Extensible front matter system. (I abuse it to stuff an arbitrary JSON object into each page.)
+ Did I mention how fast it was?
- Debugging is hell. Error messages are unintelligible and generally distract from whatever the actual issue is.
- The structure of a theme is sort of unintuitive, but that may be personal preference.
- Lack of support for more user-friendly templating languages like Jinja2 (this is likely due to speed, but I'd still like the options.)
1. You're dealing with thousands or more pages. Jekyll can be slow as heck passed a few hundreds of posts. Benchmarks [1] show that Hugo is way
2. You want to avoid dealing with Ruby. Honestly, every single time I have to install a Ruby app I end up wasting 30 minutes on nonsense (wrong version, dependency hell, ...).
There are many things you can try to improve the speed of your Jekyll site (avoid loops, use Javascript to load some elements/features, leverage some configuration tricks [2]), but Hugo is just flat out much faster and much easier to deploy.
[1]: http://fredrikloch.me/post/2014-08-12-Jekyll-and-its-alterna... [2]: http://scottpatten.ca/2011/11/speeding-up-jekyll-generation....
It is and it does.
It annoys me when using a tool require a functional development environment for the ecosystem it is based upon. E.g., ruby-based tools install via 'gem' and node-based tools install via 'npm', both of which are potentially huge hassles.
A nice aspect of go-based tools is that you can always just download a binary.
But despite the recent Node major version upgrades, I've had almost no problems with npm, while I always seem to have issues with Ruby/gem installs.
Binaries with no dependencies still win for convenience, but even Go has an ecosystem of libraries to deal with if you need to rebuild something. So I see the three on a spectrum: Go is always awesome, NodeJS usually works (and often has a package that supports functionality that Go lacks), and Ruby consistently makes me sad.
NodeJS also has a larger pool of experienced developers, which isn't everything, but it can be important, depending on whether the project is something that I will want to eventually offload.
If you need to build a version of master, or the project doesn't provide a static binary, or you don't wish to trust some random binary on the internet, or you wish to package a Go binary, it suddenly becomes terrible.
1. Build a version of master -- Go does not have a way to version or lock dependencies, so it's possible master will only build on the developers machine. The state of the art solution for that is vendoring, but each vendoring tool behaves slightly different, and even that results in some hell. It's not fun.
2. No static binary -- See 1, except now you're supposed to use 'go get' which is one of the most error-prone pieces of shit I've ever seen. It won't work with vendoring, so have fun.
3. Don't trust a random binary on the internet -- See 1 or 4
4. Package for a distro -- Good luck packaging go well. The informal ad-hoc dependency mess ensures that properly packaging go is almost impossible. The vendoring tools means you'll have hell modeling dependencies so you can react to security issues. Basically, your life will suck.
Ruby and NodeJS have none of those problems. To build a version of master, you have a gemfile / package.json that, if it follows specifications, will correctly tell you everything, down to the version, that should be installed.
Distros have tons of tools for packaging those languages and modeling them well. It works and is usually easy.
There's a single distribution method (npm / rubygems) so you don't have to check if there's a site with a curl | bash script, or a static binary download, or a github release page, or some other strange situation.
> NodeJS also has a larger pool of experienced developers
Citation needed. I have no qualm with the "larger pool" bit which very well could be true, but "experienced" and "NodeJS" don't go together so often in my book
You can set specific versions, but the default behavior is to do >= or ~ versions, at least in Node. But you could potentially go in and change the references to =version# to get a version closer to the one the developer built -- but even then there's no guarantee that the latest build hasn't had a more recent download of the packages, with newer versions than those specified in package.json.
But I didn't know this about go package importing. I'm a bit disappointed that they didn't at least make it possible to import @ a particular hash.
You could look at the last check-in and pull versions of each of the dependent repos as of that date, if the latest builds don't work.
>"experienced" and "NodeJS" don't go together so often in my book
Touche.
But I've encountered similar issues with Ruby, TBH (allegedly senior developers who turn out to be slow and not as experienced as I had hoped), and it happens that the JavaScript developers I have around me seem stronger than the Ruby developers. But more and more developers are training every year; I read one article that alleged that junior developers outnumber senior by a factor of something like 18-1 at this point. So I'm statistically likely to be surrounded by an insulating layer of junior developers no matter the language I choose. :)
If I type "npm install --save foo", it gives me "^1.2.3" which says "everything compatible with the current version".
If you don't follow semver specification and make incompatible changes, well, :(
You also have the wonderful npm shrinkwrap command (https://docs.npmjs.com/cli/shrinkwrap) which locks you down similar to a Gemfile.lock, but inline with how the npm world works.
Thanks for tooting your horn about being senior while also being factually incorrect about the default behavior of node and not knowing you can use shrinkwrap to leave the loose version specifications but also commit what they actually resolved to on your machine.
A few things I've found interesting are:
- Getting the layout just right takes a bit of tinkering (I mean the layout, theme and include file locations - not the CSS).
- The `hugo` executable is just perfect. hugo server --watch is all you need (plus it's super fast!)
- Also, I'm not a Ruby person. I don't need a whole Ruby ecosystem working on my machine just to parse some markdown.
- Grab the repo https://github.com/spf13/hugoThemes and flip through the themes. Personally, I don't keep the repository in my Hugo project, but just have a soft link to the base directory. Then, the command `hugo server --theme=MyThemeHere`, let's me instantly see what my website looks like under a new theme.
- The ruby gem s3_website (https://github.com/laurilehmijoki/s3_website) lets me update my Amazon hosted website instantly. Basically, I just run `rm -rf ./public && hugo && s3_website push` after adding a new page and I'm done.
- In any case, like liquidmetal, I'm not a Ruby person, but I was able to easily modify the themes into something that worked well for me. I started using Hugo after running through the other popular static site generators and found Hugo the easiest to get up and running and maintain.
Here's a quick guide on settings up automated deploys with hugo and netlify: https://www.netlify.com/blog/2015/10/06/a-step-by-step-guide...
I am a ruby guy and I really like Middleman, but there are things to like about Hugo. I like how it can pull data files. What I am not sure and need to explore, with Middleman I can implement pulling of the data, I am not sure I could do this with Hugo, but on the other hand, it can pull CSV and JSON from remote, so that is good. Also, taxonomy looks nice, I can see how all this can be useful.
Overall I am pleasantly surprised how well it is done. Some syntax definitely looks weird, but it might be just that I need to adjust to it.
Really happy to discover something new. Excellent work.
I'm currently using a simple script that pulls together fossil, s3cmd and gnu parallel to send the content over to s3. Fossil is used to track what changed, s3cmd is the work horse and parallel uploads multiple files at a time.
The movie example is similar to what I am after: https://gohugo.io/taxonomies/overview/
I use it myself for a couple of sites and I hope that the team continues to get the recognition it deserves for creating such a useful bit of software.
Incidentally, the license has recently changed to the Apache 2.0 license so hopefully this will encourage even wider adoption/contribution.
I went with hugo because it is very fast, and I didn't need to install any dependencies locally or on my server.
I bought a theme from themeforest and converted it to a hugo theme. It was a great learning experience, but the docs on actually creating a theme were a bit thin.
Hugo compiles fast, and the templating system is easy to understand and modify. Only wish it had support for directly compiling it and pushing the changed files from last pushed version via SFTP or even FTP.
If you're interested in the beta, hit me up on twitter @_brianknapp.
(I still use Dreamweaver 8 for static pages. They render just fine with modern browsers.)
You can use hugo to fetch JSON, YAML or CSV data from remote URLs and use those data as part of the build process. And if you use local data files instead of HTML you can use a tool like netlify-cms (github.com/netlify/netlify-cms) to give end users an easy way to work with that structured data without ever touching text editors or the like...
And as jacquesm said, once you have a more complex site with lots of pages, you'll want to use partials, reuse content in different places (show a summary of an article on an index page, full article inside, small blurbs on the homepage, etc), and once you get there you really don't want to write HTML by hand...
Also worth mentioning is OSG [2], a sitemap generator written in go that I use in my bash script. It's very fast. This may have some advantages over hugos built in sitemap generator depending on your site, though I think I would use hugos in most cases. Might be useful for others using other static generators that don't support sitemaps and also have other CMS's and carts / forums installed too.
Netlify will make sure you get true atomic deploys where no changes go live before all changes have been uploaded and handles instant cache invalidation.
We have built-in support for hugo for our integrated continuous deployment system, and can do builds triggered by webhooks. So for any setup where you're building based on external files, you can easily trigger rebuilds whenever one of those datasources gets updates...