What You Need

You’ll need your trusty text editor and some experience building things for the web with HTML and CSS. This book doesn’t go into much detail about those things and assumes you’ve built websites before. You won’t use any CSS frameworks for the layout of your site, but you will use a small amount of modern CSS. The CSS you’ll use in this book is intended to demonstrate concepts, not to substitute for careful and professional design. However, if you’re an experienced web developer, you’ll be able to see exactly where you can apply your existing knowledge as you build out your design.

Hugo runs on Windows, macOS, and various flavors of Linux and BSD operating systems, and it’s a single binary file with no dependencies. You’ll download and install Hugo in the first chapter. The examples of this book use Hugo version 0.68.3.

Because Hugo is a command-line tool, you should be comfortable using the command-line interface (CLI). You’ll use the hugo command throughout the book to build your site, launch a development server, and generate files. If you want to get more comfortable with the CLI, you’ll find Small, Sharp Software Tools [Hog19] helpful.

The examples in this book will show CLI commands for copying and moving files. These commands will work in the macOS and Linux terminals, and they will also work on Windows machines using the Windows Subsystem for Linux if you’ve configured that. Alternatively, you can use your graphical environment or text editor to manage and create files.

Additionally, some experience with JavaScript will be helpful when integrating search into the site.

Finally, in Chapter 5, ​Adding a Blog​ and Chapter 7, ​Managing Assets with Pipes​, you’ll use Node.js^[5] for some additional tooling. You should have Node.js installed on your system by following the official installation instructions for your platform.