Welp, I switched this website from Gatsby to Hugo.

This reminds me of my distro-hoppin’ days, when I used to spend nights installing different Linux distributions and then meticulously configuring them to my liking. “Oh man, I can get so much done with this distro!”, I’d say. I spent so mush time trying to find that perfect setup, that I didn’t spend much time actually using them to get things done.

Well, I guess I haven’t changed much. After writing a single post, I decided to try something else for this website. Let’s at least talk about the notable changes in a second post…

Go-ing There with package.json⌗

Hugo doesn’t need a package.json but I couldn’t bring myself to delete it. Old habits die hard I guess. I added a couple things to it to make it feel worthwhile:

• I use yarn workspaces to install dependencies for the theme when I run yarn install from the repo’s base directory. All I had to do was add this to the package.json:

  "workspaces": [
    "themes/terminal"
  ],
  

• I added this cool npm module that installs a hugo binary to the dev dependencies. If I want to work on this website on a new computer, I only have to run yarn install!

Github Actions: Rewind It Back⌗

With Gatsby, I used this action to deploy it. But this time around, I felt like I had a better understanding of what was going on here. With a little help from this article, I (mostly) wrote it by hand. The process is simple:

1. Checkout the website’s git repository
2. Run yarn install to install the theme’s npm dependencies
3. Run hugo to build the website
4. Publish the contents of the public directory (where hugo builds to) to the gh-pages branch.

Those package.json changes I mentioned earlier came in handy here. Here’s what it looks like:

jobs:
  build:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - name: Checkout
        uses: actions/checkout@v2
        with:
          submodules: true
          fetch-depth: 0

      - name: Use Node.js
        uses: actions/setup-node@v1
        with:
          node-version: 12.x

      # This also installs Hugo since it's in my dependencies!
      - name: Install dependencies
        run: yarn install

      - name: Build
        run: yarn build

      - name: Create CNAME file
        run: cp CNAME public/CNAME

      - name: Publish
        uses: peaceiris/actions-gh-pages@v3
        with:
          github_token: ${{ secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN }}
          publish_dir: ./public
          user_name: 'github-actions[bot]'
          user_email: 'github-actions[bot]@users.noreply.github.com'
          commit_message: ${{ github.event.head_commit.message }}

Using Timestamps in Folder Names⌗

I really like the idea of prefixing post names with YYYY-MM-DD so they’re listed in date order when listed alphabetically. Like this:

$ ls content/posts
2020-08-02-creating-this-website/
2020-10-03-switching-to-hugo/

Hugo has a way to get the creation date from those timestamps! See the :filename date handler here. In my config.toml, I have:

[frontmatter]
date = [":filename", ":default"]

You can also get the date that it was last updated from git by enabling gitinfo:

enableGitInfo = true

I don’t think I’ve ever been so excited about creation and updated dates before! These changes give me the file structure I want, keep the creation dates in a single place, and make the updated dates entirely automatic! 💃

Remove Timestamp from Title⌗

At this point, if you run

$ hugo new posts/2020-10-03-switching-to-hugo

It gets the creation date from the folder name as expected, but the new post has the title “2020 10 03 Switching To Hugo”. How do I get that timestamp out of there? After plenty of trial and error, I finally came up with this template for the post archetype:

title: "{{ replace ( replaceRE "^\\d+-\\d+-\\d+-" "" .Name 1 ) "-" " " | title }}"

That template removes the timestamp, then replaces hyphens with spaces, then capitalizes the first letters of each word. Note that you can nest templates with parentheses.

Now when I run the same command, the title is “Switching To Hugo”. Ahh much better.

That’s All Folks⌗

That’s it for now, we’ll see how Hugo works out. If I switch again, I’ll be sure to post some updates!