Switching to Hugo

October 22, 2018 • Programming, Personal

I’ve been using Jekyll to host this website since I’ve started it. I originally started using it because it’s what Github Pages provided, but since I wanted to use a custom theme, I had to use several hacks to publish a compiled version of my site to the master branch. I’ve finally switched to Hugo, since I figured that if I was going to have to roll my own publication tools, I might as well use a site generator that fit with my mental model.

Jekyll is a perfectly good piece of software, and I really enjoyed using it, but there were a few issues that got me to switch:

• Lots of special cases. To write a post in Jekyll, you had to create a file in the _posts directory; the templating engine now knows that these are blog posts that should be included on the main blog pages. This hooked into the pagination system in a way that I’m not sure I could fully explain. The posts’ dates were determined by looking at the prefixes of the files, rather than setting a variable in the frontmatter.

  In contrast, Hugo treats all pages a little like this: each page in the content/ directory is included in a tree of pages. Lower directories are in their own subsections; this means that everything in the blog/ directory is grouped together, as is anything in any other directory. I find this much easier to understand, because there’s one general case instead of a general case and special case. Oh, and the publication date is controlled by frontmatter, rather than looking at the filename.

  Likewise, Hugo’s “taxonomy” system is equally general: there can be as many different taxonomies as you like (this site only uses category), and they can all be accessed by name. I’m not 100% certain that Jekyll doesn’t support this, but if they do, their docs don’t make it apparent.

  There are several other features (cough Menus cough) that I think Hugo does better because it treats them as general-purpose features instead of special case features.

• Combination of presentation and content. All static site generators have this to some extent, whether we like it or not. What I didn’t like about Jekyll was that all of the website content was in the top-level directory, mixed in with all the configuration. Hugo, on the other hand, places all website content in the content directory. It’s a very small difference, but that separation helps me keep track of which content gets published.

• Lack of user-friendly tooling. Jekyll isn’t bad in this respect, but I think Hugo is better. For example, Hugo has a feature that it calls “archetypes,” which are file templates for new content files. The default one just creates a draft page, but you can easily add others. Which archetype is used when creating a new page has to do with its subgroup, which is determined by its directory.

  There are a few other examples of this lack of tooling, but I think the archetypes feature most clearly illustrates the differences that I see.

So I’ve switched! This is the first post that I’m publishing with Hugo after a long time setting up my theme (that’s what I get for porting a custom theme). Was it worth it? Yes. (Probably.)