Like Jekyll, Hugo is a static site generator. I have personally found Hugo to be faster for development, more flexible, and more simple to use. As a result, I switched my blog to using it.

GitHub unfortunately, does not have native support Hugo, so it requires a little extra effort it to make it work. This documents how I did it.

Two Branches Link to heading

I suggest having two branches in your repo:

  • source: this is where your raw files will live
  • master: this will be your published site that GitHub will in turn host

GitHub only allows username.github.io sites to publish from the master branch. Other types of repos can use the master, gh-pages, or /docs directory though.

Build and Publish Link to heading

To accomplish the building and publishing of the Hugo site I use a short shell script:

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#!/bin/bash
# Deploy hugo site to master branch
#
# Assumes you are on a branch called 'source' for storing the
# source and building. Builds and pushes to 'master' branch.
#
# Joshua Powers <mrpowersj@gmail.com>
set -ux

BRANCH_CURRENT=$(git rev-parse --abbrev-ref HEAD)
BRANCH_MASTER="master"
BRANCH_SOURCE="source"
BUILD_DIR="build"
GIT_REMOTE="origin"
GIT_REMOTE_URL=$(git remote get-url --push "$GIT_REMOTE")

cleanup() {
    if [ -d "$BUILD_DIR" ]; then
        rm -rf "$BUILD_DIR"
    fi
}

error() {
    echo "$@" 1>&2
}

fail() {
    [ $# -eq 0 ] || error "$@"
    exit 1
}

if [ "$BRANCH_CURRENT" != "$BRANCH_SOURCE" ]; then
    fail "not on source branch"
fi

echo "updating git submodules"
git submodule init || fail "submodule init failed"
git submodule update || fail "submodule update failed"

echo "building site"
cleanup
hugo --destination "$BUILD_DIR" || fail "build failed"
pushd "$BUILD_DIR" || fail "could not change to build dir"

echo "creating git commit"
git init
git remote add "$GIT_REMOTE" "$GIT_REMOTE_URL"
git checkout --orphan "$BRANCH_MASTER"
git add .
git commit -m "site updated at $(date -u "+%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S") UTC"

echo "publishing site"
git push --force "$GIT_REMOTE" "$BRANCH_MASTER"

popd
cleanup

This updates your submodules, making sure you have the latest version of your themes, build’s the site to a specific build directory, then from the build directory pushes the site to your master branch.

The force push is a little harsh, as you lose history, but because the master branch is used only for rendering the site it seems to work.