How to install/use Hugo in WSL (Ubuntu 18.04)

It’s been a while since I wrote on this blog and today when I git cloned the blog repo and attempted to update it, I quickly realised that I could not for the life of me remember all of the commands I needed to run in order to download the theme submodule and deploy the site after writing a new post.

So, for my future self and posterity’s sake in this post I will be documenting the commands I need for installing Hugo, downloading the site and its theme(s), creating a new post and deploying it:

Installing Hugo

I like installing Hugo using the tarball/binary method as it does not require me to install any arcane package managers beforehand.

The following commands run in succession will download the latest tarball version (at the time of writing) of Hugo to my $HOME directory, and extract the binary therein into my /usr/local/bin/ directory. The last command deletes the tarball from your $HOME directory.

cd ~
wget https://github.com/gohugoio/hugo/releases/download/v0.64.1/hugo_0.64.1_Linux-64bit.tar.gz
sudo tar -C /usr/local/bin -xzf hugo_$VERSION_$OS-$ARCH.tar.gz
cd ~ && rm hugo_0.64.1_Linux-64bit.tar.gz

Downloading the site and its theme

I setup my site’s theme as a git submodule because it’s easier to manage that way I think. Once I’ve cloned my site’s git repo I need to run git submodule update in order to download the theme from its repository into my /themes folder. The --recursive flag finds any other submodules within my repo and downloads them as well… recursively.

git submodule update --init --recursive

Usage

Once all of the above is done, I can then run hugo server --ignoreCache --disableFastRender from the site root to serve the site on the default URL: http://localhost:1313.

hugo server --ignoreCache --disableFastRender

To create a new blog post I run hugo new post/title-of-post.md, edit the newly created .md file in /content/post/, commit and push the changes. That’s it.

The build and deployment step is currently handled by a CircleCI workflow that compiles the source to HTML/CSS/JS and deploys that to another Github Pages repo. I will document that part in another post. Maybe.