Building a Static Site with Hugo

Hugo is a useful tool for creating a website. In these notes, I will refer to using Hugo alongside Github. Github is used here both as a place to store the code for your site so that you can collaborate with others and access it from any computer, and as a way of hosting your site (putting it online so others can see it).

To begin with, make a github account here. Then create a new repository. This will be a folder where your code will live. Next you need to clone this repository locally so that you can open it on your computer and edit it. In your web browser, navigate to Github.com and open the main page of your repository. Click “code” and copy the repository URL.

Next, open terminal and change the current working directory to the place where you want your site to live locally. type “git clone” and then paste your repository URL, like this:

$ git clone https://github.com/YOUR-USERNAME/YOUR-REPOSITORY

Press enter and your repository will clone. (If you need additional help at this step, find more documentation here). Now you can move on to getting started building your website with Hugo!

Next you will want to install Hugo. The Hugo documentation has an excellent quickstart guide. Follow these directions to build a barebones version of your site. Be sure to build your hugo site inside the local repository that you cloned from Github earlier. You can come back to this and edit it further later. Make sure everything is saved. Next we’ll push your local changes to the github repository you made earlier.