Moving from Jekyll to Hugo

Why?

• Jekyll is SLOW. Takes about 25 secs to build this site right now, and this site is pretty small right now, less than 500 posts. There are no tags or categories or pagination yet and it’s at 20 seconds already. I have to wait for it to finish in order to see any changes, and i make changes often, so i end up waiting often.
• Slow is pretty much my only complaint. While i haven’t been able to put up pages with clickable tags, and dislike that in order to set a default post for a collection i have to create a new config block (i have about 20+ collections, which means 20+ code blocks in config.yml that just say ``), Jekyll has been working for this very simple site of mine.

Hugo

• Everything goes in the content folder where you can have subfolders. (No _drafts, _posts and no creating a lot of _collection folders in the root dir like in Jekyll)
• Pagination and redirects (aliases) works out of the box
• instead of having to place unfinished posts inside the _draft folder, you can put draft: true in the front matter of the post
• Built-in livereload, automatically refreshes your browsers when changes are made
• Templates use Go instead of Liquid
• Hugo will accept TOML, YAML, or JSON (default is TOML) while Jekyll accepts only YAML. The front matter metadata at the top of each content file uses the same syntax as the config.
• You can set up templates called archetypes that hold customized front matter for pages of different types (like if you have both a blog and a podcast on your website)

1brew install hugo # install hugo
2hugo version # verify your new install
3hugo new site quickstart # create a new quickstart site
4hugo new content/<page.md> # create new content page
5hugo serve # serve and watch the site
6hugo # build Hugo site

Links

• Hugo vs. Jekyll: Comparing the leading static website generators
• Hugo vs. Jekyll: a showdown of static site generator