Hugo for static site generation
A little over a year ago, I started using Pelican for static site generation. After not having used Pelican since March of 2019, I decided to pick it up again. Once upgrading Pelican, numerous submodules and plugins, I struggled to get everything working again. Like any good software engineer :) , after not getting anywhere for a few hours, I decided to nuke it and start over.
My requirements for static site generation remained the same, and in searching for alternatives, I considered the following:
I set up an environment and tied each. Here are some quick highlights on my (super quick and subjective) proof of concepts:
- 11ty: Really great community, but being Node.js based, this created an additional maintenance step for me in keeping up that environment (I have no other Node.js self-hosted services or environments)
- Jekyll: Probably the most robust and largest community, but maintaining the Ruby environment to keep this working is a virtual nightmare. I used Chruby to get up and running, but quickly realized that I don’t have any ruby apps running for a reason
- Hugo: Decent community, plenty of templates, and a single GO binary. I’m sold.
With Hugo now selected, I found a template that closely resembled the structure of my old site (Pelican/Flex), and got to work recreating content. I’m super happy about the outcome…for now :)
Next up, I’ll be writing about how I fully automated the static site generation and publishing to Amazon S3 for hosting using my internally hosted Gitea and Drone CI servers.