Switching to Hugo

Until “now” I was happy user of Jekyll static site generator, everything worked fine with it and blog was easy to manage. The major drawback of Jekyll (for me that is) is that it is written in Ruby and I never before worked with Ruby. Because of this I diceded to go the “easy” route and use docker image to simplify the initial installation and Jekyll management.

The official docker image works fine, the only thing I needed to do was to add ruby gem local cache so it would not need to download all that mess over and over again (what a hell that is). This setup worked fine until for some reason docker started crashing from time to time.
It somehow was always down after some time when I wanted to create some post. And since this is the only thing using docker on my VPS I decided to throw it away and once again jump into the rabbit hole of internet to find a good solution to replace it (I am too lazy to craft one from the ground up).

I did a bit of searching here and there and I also had some memories from the time I was first setting my blog and I decided to go with Hugo. Hugo is written in go and which I am not a big fan (dependencies listed as urls scares me) but for me as end user it is great since the thing I need to use/get is only one binary. No need for docker and for gem (libraries) cache.

During my research of Hugo I discovered that themes and templates are done in a bit different way than in Jekyll so if I wanted to keep my theme from Jekyll I would need to rewrite it on my own (which is pain) so I decided to dive into another rabbit hole of design and search for the “good” theme. Lucky me I found one good looking (to me that is) called Hugo Dusk which I took and modified to suit my weird taste and needs. I think it looks even better than the previous one.

With Jekyll I was using few include templates to make writing posts easier like inputing images and videos. Luckily Hugo provides similar functionality with its “shortcodes” which already contains one for images (figure) but lacked one for video (I do not count youtube and vimeo) so I crafted one by myself and everything works just fine.

Here and there I still play with design a bit, adjusting details might take a while.

To sum it up, I got rid of docker and ruby. I added Hugo and changed the theme of my blog (it was a good opportunity to do so). Overall it was a good move, I still have a lot to learn with Hugo to make a better use of it and for now I am fully satisfied with it.

That is all, you can find the source codes at the website repository