Install and Configure Hugo

Install Hugo on Windows

The simplest way to install on Windows will be using Microsoft’s Winget package manager.

More details can be found here: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/package-manager/

To install using Winget:

winget install Hugo.Hugo.Extended

To confirm installation:

hugo version

Install Hugo on Linux

The simplest way to install on linux will be using the distributions package manager.

For this guide, we will be installing on a Debian based linux distribution, which uses the apt pacakge manager.

To install using apt:

sudo apt install hugo

To confirm installation:

hugo version

Create Hugo Site

You can always get help with commands by adding help to list available commands and --help for subcommands as shown below:

hugo help
hugo server --help

Building your site is as simple as changing into the desired directory that you’d like to have it located, and running the hugo command!

But more specifically, the following will create your site in the current directory:

hugo new site .

To create a new site title “my_new_site” in a new sub-directory of the same name:

hugo new site my_new_site

This will build your site and place all the important published files into a directory titled public.

To test your site, use the hugo server command while in the project directory This will give you output for where to point your browser to test, such as localhost:1313/

hugo server

You can also run this command with the -D option to instruct hugo to build drafts for the site. This is great for testing before publishing!

Create Content

To get started creating content, simply perform the following command while in your project directory:

hugo new content posts/my_first_post.md

This will create a new file in the /content/posts directory titled my_first_post.md

Then you just need to add the content post you’d like on that page at the end of the file, using markdown format!

Unless you left it running from earlier, to test just make sure to run the hugo server -D command.

Wrap-up

And that’s it! You’ve successfully installed, created, and tested your very own Hugo framework website!