Time to start a Go blog with Hugo

16 June 2016

UPDATE: I finally merged both blogs, so this blog post doesn't make sense. I prefer Hugo to JBake but because I've been doing more Java/Groovy development, I will stay with JBake.

Well, this is embarrassing. I'm launching another blog!. Why?. Some time ago I've started to write a blog, in the beginning for corporate news but it has become a place where to write or document interesting things I do in my work, most of them related to Java, Groovy and Oracle technologies. The blog is generated with JBake with the gradle plugin, I like to use related technologies and I'm quite happy with the result, but to be honest, I don't write frequently.

Six months ago I've started to learn and use Go. I was very impressed with the simplicity of the language and I've started to read a lot of articles, books, etc., watch videos and develop some projects. I discovered Hugo, a site generator similar to JBake but written in Go. I was tempted to migrate my previous blog, but today I'm going to continue writing about not Go subjects, so it's simpler to open a new one only for Go, bots, DevOps, concurrency and perfomance. In another post I will write more about Go and why I find it so interesting.

As the first post, let's see how to configure Hugo. I've to say it was really easy, I really impressed with piece of software. I can compare with other site generators as Jekyll, Hexo or JBake, and I have to say Hugo is my favourite.

First of all, I've created a new repo in my Gihub account and cloned it in my laptop:

git clone git@github.com:antonmry/antonmry.github.io.git
cd antonmry.github.io

Because I'm going to use my github user page, the source code of the page must be in master branch. For your Hugo code, you can have a separate repo or just a different branch. I choose the second option with a branch named source, I prefer it in that way, it's simpler and this is the main difference with the procedure you can find in the excellent Hugo documentation:

git checkout -b source
git push -u origin source

Inside the source code folder, we are going to create a folder linking to the master branch:

git subtree add --prefix=public git@github.com:antonmry/antonmry.github.io.git master --squash
git subtree pull --prefix=public git@github.com:antonmry/antonmry.github.io.git master

It's time to generate the site. First you have to install Hugo, plenty of options in the the Hugo website. I've chosen the Fedora package, updates will be easier.

hugo new site antonmry.github.io
mv antonmry.github.io/* .
rm -r antonmry.github.io

Choose your theme, there are very nice options, I've chosen beatifulhugo:

cd themes
git clone https://github.com/halogenica/Hugo-BeautifulHugo.git beautifulhugo
cd ..
echo "theme = \"beautifulhugo\"" >> config.toml

Create your first blog and start the server:

hugo new post/hugo-site-created.md
hugo server --buildDrafts

Open in your browser http://localhost:1313/ and enjoy your first post with Hugo ;-)

Let's move the post from draft to publised: edit the file content/post/hugo-site-created.md and change the draft line from true to false if exists.

Now it's time to upload it to Gihub and make it public:

hugo
git add -A
git commit -m "Initial version"
git push
git subtree push --prefix=public git@github.com:antonmry/antonmry.github.io.git master

Oh, really, can it be so easy?. Just go to https://antonmry.github.io (or your equivalent site)

I was thinking in create a travis job to do the publishing in master (I did it before for jbake) but to be honest, this method is simple enough. I've added to my .bash_alias the last command and that's all I need.

Enjoy!

PS: if you do a rebase in source, you will need to do it a bit more tricky to push to master because you can't use --force with the subtree option:

git push origin `git subtree split --prefix public source`:master --force

More info can be found in Stackoverflow Git subtree - subtree up-to-date but can't push.