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Comment by perardi | Hacker News Reader

“Written in GO and readily installable as a binary, Hugo is tremendously portable…”

I am but a humble designer, who only knows enough to write some simple prototypes, and wants some organizational helps. Partials. Concatenating stylesheets. Little things that I used to use CodeKit for.

And I like Hugo because of that “it’s just a binary” bit. There’s no dependency hell. No leaning tower of JS or Ruby. You install it, it sits there, nothing can really break. That’s what I want.

Is that a niche criteria? Obviously. But I do appreciate it. (And if someone has a better suggestion for a very simple static site generator, bring it on.)

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Hugo can be that simple if you don't have a complex frontend template. As soon as you want to make a SPA (or SPA-like experience), use a framework like React/Vue/Svelte/etc., or even try out stuff like TailwindCSS you're going to get sucked into the deep rabbit hole of bundling frontend assets, webpack/esbuild/etc.

So you kind of have to decide, are just static templates and static assets all you need? Stick with Hugo and enjoy the speed, simplicity, etc. There are some even simpler alternatives you might enjoy too, like mdbook or mkdocs. Both are more oriented towards technical docs but are similar to hugo at their core--send in some markdown (in the case of these tools you don't even need frontmatter or other schema) and get out some HTML.

If you're building something fancier or using more complex frontend setups then... there's no perfect answer right now. It's all about balancing complexity of the build system with what it gives you in the output. IMHO webpack and gnarly dependencies can be tamed pretty well with a simple docker container. Spend some time getting your perfect workflow setup, chuck it in a container that a CI system can run all day, every day without fail, and you'll be pretty well setup.

I use Hugo with a modern front end, and it’s extremely easy to get setup, especially now that it has built in ESBuild support.

Can you share more about this? I like Hugo for its speed and simplicity, but I find it hard to create elements within components the way I can in Vue. I haven't found any good resources for combining Hugo with frontend frameworks, so I'm curious what you do.

I've switched away from Vue to using Alpine.js, which makes it easier to combine backend templates with frontend ones, but here's the repo back when I was using Vue: https://github.com/spotlightpa/poor-richard/tree/eb816cac807...

src/entrypoints/donate.js defined a custom element, which was included on layouts/donate-page/single.html and layouts/partials/get-src.html conditionally included the Vue component either with Parcel's dev server in testing or precompiled files in production.

It's not very different from what you'd do in any not-JS web framework.

Cool, thank you!

So you kind of have to decide, are just static templates and static assets all you need?

In my particular instance: yup. I’m at the “loop through an array of things in a folder” level, not “deploy at scale” level.

I would think that if you wanted a SPA-like experience, you wouldn't be choosing a static site generator, no?

Everything is kind of converging. In the SPA world they realized the SEO sucks and they need static server rendered content, so there's a whole realm of SSR (server side rendering) built around it with Next.js, Vuepress, Sveltekit, etc. And on the static site side folks realized static sites can kinda suck and feel clunky, so loading some JS to add smoothness is nice. Check out Docusaurus for an example of a static site generator that actually uses React internally to build a SSR friendly SPA with fluid page loads. You don't have to choose one or the other anymore, you can get both a smooth SPA experience with full server rendered and SEO friendly content.

Leaning tower of JS just hit me in the soul after two full days of composer and npm dependency hell. I'll have to give Hugo a try for my next fitting use case.

I have built a career around Hugo. It’s extremely capable once you learn its core concepts.

Can you expound a bit on what you are doing with Hugo vocationally?

https://github.com/spotlightpa/poor-richard/

Wow, excellent!

>And I like Hugo because of that “it’s just a binary” bit. There’s no dependency hell.

I had that issue with Jekyll, I just couldn't get the set up to work on my system (to be fair, I gave up easily instead of asking for help).

When I came across Zola (https://github.com/getzola/zola), I was immediately drawn by the single binary aspect.

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