What’s in This Book

Each chapter of the book covers a specific part of the development process with Hugo.

In Chapter 1, ​Kicking the Tires​, you’ll build the home page and a few supporting pages, along with a skeleton layout.

Then, in Chapter 2, ​Building a Basic Theme​, you’ll transform the layout into a custom theme for the site. You’ll break things up into reusable pieces and put everything in its place.

In Chapter 3, ​Adding Content Sections​, you’ll create the projects section of the site. You’ll work with custom content types and build out more customized layouts for your new content type.

Then, you’ll integrate data into the site in Chapter 4, ​Working with Data​. You’ll leverage front matter from your docs, data from external files, and data from external sites. You will also render some of your content as JSON data.

In Chapter 5, ​Adding a Blog​, you’ll use what you’ve learned so far to use Hugo to build a static blog. You’ll create a content template for blog posts, create a custom layout to control how your posts display, and add support for commenting. You’ll generate lists of posts, including a main list of posts in reverse chronological order, as well as lists for tags and categories.

In Chapter 6, ​Adding Search to Your Site​, you’ll get search working with your site using a search index along with some client-side JavaScript.

Next, in Chapter 7, ​Managing Assets with Pipes​, you’ll set up a proper asset pipeline so that you can manage your JavaScript and CSS files more easily. You’ll switch to using Sass for your stylesheets and explore some of Hugo’s built-in features for handling images. You’ll also look at integrating Webpack with Hugo, and using npm to manage tasks that make building your site easier.

In Chapter 8, ​Deploying the Site​, you’ll explore a few methods to move your site to production for the world to see. You’ll deploy to Netlify, then look at deploying to Amazon S3, and finally, how to deploy to more traditional web servers.

Finally, you’ll find Appendix 1, ​Migrating to Hugo​, which explores the process of what it takes to move an existing site to Hugo.

At the end of each chapter, you’ll find a few additional exercises that will help cement your knowledge of the concepts.