I recently converted my blog from Octopress to Hugo. I really like Hugo. It’s easy to use and ridiculously fast. Hugo also aligns well with my recent foray into Go and it’s been a delight to comb through the source code.

Given the infrequency of my posts I usually have to re-learn my blog workflow every time I created a new post. To make things easier I put together a README that details my post/publish workflow. I’ve posted my workflow below. I hope you find it useful!

Overview

This is the repository for illyabusigin.com. This blog is built with Hugo, a static site generator written in Go and hosted in S3. Because this blog is a static site and hosted on S3 there are zero scalability concerns.

Setup

The repository layout is below. I’ve omitted some folders and files for brevity.

/README.md
/blog
	- config.toml
	- content/
		- about/
		- archive/
		- code/
		- post/  
	- public/
	- static/
	- themes/

In order to create new posts and publish you will need to install a few tools. You can install these tools via Homebrew:

brew install hugo
brew install s3cmd

To use s3cmd you will need to configure it with the appropriate S3 access key and signature key. You can invoke the setup process with s3cmd --configure command.

Create New Post

The blog resides in the blog/ folder. Content is organized by year. To create a new post for 2015 you would execute the following command:

cd ~/blog/
hugo new post/2015/post_name.md

Local Version

Hugo has the ability to create a local copy of your site with live reload when content changes. To stand up this local site, execute the following command:

hugo server -wD
// -w watch filesystem for changes and recreate as needed
// -D include content marked as draft

NOTE: Run hugo help to see a list of all hugo commands.

Publishing

Publishing your blog is easy with s3cmd. Assuming you configured s3cmd you would perform the following command:

// Navigate to the blog/ directory in your repo
hugo | s3cmd sync ./public/ s3://www.illyabusigin.com/

Let’s dissect what’s going on in the publishing step:

1. Navigate to the root directory of your repostitory.

2. Running hugo generates the live version of your site. It’s very important to run this command as running hugo server generates a local version of your site that is not suitable for upload.

3. Running s3cmd sync ./public/ s3://www.illyabusigin.com/ synchronizes the contents of the public folder with your S3 bucket.