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The most basic possible Hugo site

With Claude's help I figured out what I think is the most basic version of a static site generated using Hugo.

I wanted a base template that set out a common layout, then two example of pages that used that layout to render content with a custom title.

This is my first time ever trying out Hugo so it's quite possible there's an even simpler approach, but this is what I got to.

The layouts

Hugo uses a directory called layouts to define its templates. I created three files in this directory:

layouts/_default/baseof.html

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
    <title>{{ .Title }}</title>
</head>
<body>
    <nav>
        <a href="/">Home</a>
        <a href="/about">About</a>
    </nav>
    {{ .Content }}
    <footer>
        <p>My Site Footer</p>
    </footer>
</body>
</html>

layouts/_default/single.html

{{ define "main" }}
    {{ .Content }}
{{ end }}

layouts/index.html

{{ define "main" }}
    {{ .Content }}
{{ end }}

Note that index.html and single.html are identical. I'm not sure why Hugo needed both - the index.html file is used for the homepage.

The content

I created a content directory with two files in it:

content/_index.md

---
title: Welcome
---
# Welcome to my site

This is my homepage content in Markdown.

content/about.html

---
title: About
---
<h1>About Us</h1>
<p>This is the about page, written directly in HTML.</p>

Note that both of these have frontmatter at the top to define the title. This seems to be the right pattern for combining HTML content and Markdown content in the same project.

According to the Hugo documentation:

_index.md has a special role in Hugo. It allows you to add front matter and content to home, section, taxonomy, and term pages.

Since I'm not using the taxonomy and term features yet this probably isn't relevant to me.

Getting Hugo working

Here's a Bash script that, when run, will create the directories and files listed above:

mkdir hugo-site
cd hugo-site
mkdir -p layouts/_default content
cat > layouts/_default/baseof.html <<EOF
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
    <title>{{ .Title }}</title>
</head>
<body>
    <nav>
        <a href="/">Home</a>
        <a href="/about">About</a>
    </nav>
    {{ .Content }}
    <footer>
        <p>My Site Footer</p>
    </footer>
</body>
</html>
EOF
cat > layouts/_default/single.html <<EOF
{{ define "main" }}
    {{ .Content }}
{{ end }}
EOF
cat > layouts/index.html <<EOF
{{ define "main" }}
    {{ .Content }}
{{ end }}
EOF
cat > content/_index.md <<EOF
---
title: Welcome
---
# Welcome to my site

This is my homepage content in Markdown.
EOF
cat > content/about.html <<EOF
---
title: About
---
<h1>About Us</h1>
<p>This is the about page, written directly in HTML.</p>
EOF

Having created these files (in a hugo-site folder) we can initialize a Hugo site like this:

hugo new site . --force

The --force flag is needed because we are creating the site in a directory that already contains files.

Now run this to preview the site in a browser:

hugo server

And visit http://localhost:1313/ to see the site.

The About page is now located at /about/ and the homepage is at /.

Building the site for deployment

Running this command builds a static version of the site in the public directory:

hugo build

When I ran it I got this non-fatal warning:

WARN  found no layout file for "html" for kind "taxonomy": You should create a template file which matches Hugo Layouts Lookup Rules for this combination.

Since I wasn't using the taxonomy feature I added the following to the hugo.conf file that had been generated for me:

disableKinds = ['taxonomy', 'term']

After this, hugo build ran without warnings.

The public folder contained these files:

public
public/index.html
public/index.xml
public/about
public/about/index.html
public/sitemap.xml

index.yml is an RSS 2.0 feed, and sitemap.xml is a Sitemap.

Both of these had example.org hard-coded into them, e.g. sitemap.xml looked like this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" standalone="yes"?>
<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9"
  xmlns:xhtml="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
  <url>
    <loc>https://example.org/about/</loc>
  </url><url>
    <loc>https://example.org/</loc>
  </url>
</urlset>

The fix for that is to update hugo.toml to set the domain name where the site will be deployed:

baseURL = 'https://example.simonwillison.net/'
languageCode = 'en-us'
title = 'My example site'
disableKinds = ['taxonomy', 'term']

Running hugo build rewrites the sitemap.xml and index.xml files to use the correct domain name.

I haven't actually deployed a Hugo site yet, but I expect I'll try this using either GitHub Pages or Netlify or Cloudflare Pages soon.