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Hugo

A Fast and Flexible Static Site Generator written in Go
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What is Hugo?

Hugo is a static site generator written in Go. It is optimized for speed, easy use and configurability. Hugo takes a directory with content and templates and renders them into a full html website. Hugo makes use of markdown files with front matter for meta data.
Hugo is a tool in the Static Site Generators category of a tech stack.
Hugo is an open source tool with GitHub stars and GitHub forks. Here’s a link to Hugo's open source repository on GitHub

Who uses Hugo?

Companies
260 companies reportedly use Hugo in their tech stacks, including Buzzvil, Braincube, and NetApp.

Developers
990 developers on StackShare have stated that they use Hugo.

Hugo Integrations

Golang, Markdown, Strapi, Buddy, and GitLab Pages are some of the popular tools that integrate with Hugo. Here's a list of all 13 tools that integrate with Hugo.
Pros of Hugo
47
Lightning fast
29
Single Executable
26
Easy setup
24
Great development community
23
Open source
13
Write in golang
8
Not HTML only - JSON, RSS
8
Hacker mindset
7
LiveReload built in
4
Gitlab pages integration
4
Easy to customize themes
4
Very fast builds
3
Well documented
3
Fast builds
3
Easy to learn
Decisions about Hugo

Here are some stack decisions, common use cases and reviews by companies and developers who chose Hugo in their tech stack.

Needs advice
on
AstroAstroSvelteKitSvelteKit
and
Vue.jsVue.js

Hello everybody! I want to create an easy to use website (and simplified) builder. Users create a site, add their domain and edit Pages inside an Admin Area inside predefined "Blocks" like with Wagtail.

There should be several default templates/themes and layouts. Choosing a different theme might change both the layout and styling. And I'm looking for SSR or SSG with a focus on the end-user's Page performance.

Current Stack:

  • GraphQL for the dynamic part (for example data to Pricing might not be required on the homepage, or images might go into gallery in one theme, and on the homepage in another theme)

  • FastAPI and SQLAlchemy to store Data. I have prior experience with Wagtail and Django and want to stay with Python and learn Fastapi

  • NGINX to handle domain-specific things (the how is not yet refined)

I want a scalable architecture and especially a fast frontend. I'm tending to use SvelteKit, but I'm afraid that the dynamic part won't make me happy after having hundreds of sites, as the bundler cannot load themes dynamically. sveltekit - dynamic import

I want to handle the scenario: Admin-User chooses a theme and other options for the site (domain) and the End-User Frontend/Session/Cookie will have to fetch and store data about the theme and load subsequent calls to prerendered sites.

Also the "hundreds of sites" might not be all covered by 5 Themes, because users may purchase a custom-made theme, and I would have to manage one big project having lots of different Styleguides and flows. I even thought of statically building the site whenever the user makes a change, maybe using Hugo (or VitePress?). Then I would have to take more care with the page recreation and it would be easily routable instead of nesting every component with logic in the frontend... I think. But this I haven't thought through yet.

Can anyone please help?

See more
Needs advice
on
HugoHugo
and
ReactReact

Our company's website needs to be redesigned. So I got the task of redesigning, right now the management is saying to use Hugo. Well, Hugo is good for a single-page web app, in our website there are a lot of things such as forms, location, and many different things so doing all this customization in Hugo is a bit difficult so I am in a confusion state whether to use Hugo or use different technology such as React to build a company's website. So what do you recommend to use Hugo or React for building a complete website?

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Gabriel Guzman
Software Development Manager at Lightspeed · | 1 upvote · 107.6K views
Shared insights

Setting up a personal website, consisting of statically generated html files.

OpenBSD @httpd Hugo Ansible

Rely on the simplicity and security record of OpenBSD to keep my deployments easy to manage and run. Ansible playbooks for easily provisioning copies of the same setup. Using the httpd daemon provided by OpenBSD as it's full featured and included in the base operating system. Hugo creates static html based on markdown files that live in my home directory, and they are copied up to the server using scp.

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Blog Posts

Hugo's Features

  • Run Anywhere - Hugo is quite possibly the easiest to install software you've ever used, simply download and run. Hugo doesn't depend on administrative privileges, databases, runtimes, interpreters or external libraries. Sites built with Hugo can be deployed on S3, Github Pages, Dropbox or any web host.
  • Fast & Powerful - Hugo is written for speed and performance. Great care has been taken to ensure that Hugo build time is as short as possible. We're talking milliseconds to build your entire site for most setups.
  • Flexible - Hugo is designed to work how you do. Organize your content however you want with any URL structure. Declare your own content types. Define your own meta data in YAML, TOML or JSON.

Hugo Alternatives & Comparisons

What are some alternatives to Hugo?
Jekyll
Think of Jekyll as a file-based CMS, without all the complexity. Jekyll takes your content, renders Markdown and Liquid templates, and spits out a complete, static website ready to be served by Apache, Nginx or another web server. Jekyll is the engine behind GitHub Pages, which you can use to host sites right from your GitHub repositories.
Hexo
Hexo is a fast, simple and powerful blog framework. It parses your posts with Markdown or other render engine and generates static files with the beautiful theme. All of these just take seconds.
WordPress
The core software is built by hundreds of community volunteers, and when you’re ready for more there are thousands of plugins and themes available to transform your site into almost anything you can imagine. Over 60 million people have chosen WordPress to power the place on the web they call “home” — we’d love you to join the family.
MkDocs
It builds completely static HTML sites that you can host on GitHub pages, Amazon S3, or anywhere else you choose. There's a stack of good looking themes available. The built-in dev-server allows you to preview your documentation as you're writing it. It will even auto-reload and refresh your browser whenever you save your changes.
Pelican
Pelican is a static site generator that supports Markdown and reST syntax. Write your weblog entries directly with your editor of choice (vim!) in reStructuredText or Markdown.
See all alternatives

Hugo's Followers
1216 developers follow Hugo to keep up with related blogs and decisions.