Migrating to Hugo

I decided to migrate my blog tu Hugo. One of the main reasons was to support multiple languages, since I decided I want to write also in Czech from time to time.

It hasn’t been exactly easy transition as I hoped for, but I will describe what I did and how it worked out.

Conversion tool

I tried to use scripts mentioned on the Hugo official documentation, but wasn’t much successful with them. I also tried hugo import jekyll. This one had better results. I had to modify the blog posts little bit anyway.

Preserving file name

One of the biggest issues I had was to preserve file name and parse date and title from it. Hugo ignores all files without title in frontmatter for me. I tried to configure it based on discussions, github and official documentation but didn’t succeed.

Posts must have title, slug and date filled in, it cannot be parsed from a filename. What a pitty :(

BaseUrl variables in markdown files

In jekyll, I had {{baseUrl}} variables in markdown files. I needed to get these to Hugo. It was quite a problem, so at the end I deleted the variables and let the browser handle URLs starting with / on its own. It worked quite well.

URL aliases

There was actually one thing I was very happy about. It was very simple to configure URL aliases, so old links wouldn’t break. It was as easy as adding following code to frontmatter:

aliases:
    - my-cool-url-alias

Picking up a template

Surprisingly, another big issue for me was picking a template. I had just one simple requirement: I needed it to work. The less configuration it require, the better. And I don’t even need anything special, for the beginning, I would be very happy with pretty much same template as I used in jekyll. I’ve found hugo-now template, but it wasn’t looking good. Home page didn’t show anything, links didn’t work and the source code style was totally broken.

I jumped over quite a lot of other templates with more or less success after I ended up using current Mainroad theme.

Code highlighting

I still have issues with turning on code higlighting, so this is one of the areas I need to work on.

Deployment

There is another major change after migration to Hugo. It requires deployemt. Previosly, jekyll was natively supported by Github pages. Now, hugo is not, so I had to set up travis-ci job to build it and deploy new changes. Luckily there are quite few articles how to do that. I used similar approach as is described on this blog post: https://www.sidorenko.io/post/2018/12/hugo-on-github-pages-with-travis-ci/.