Building a Hugo web site & Hosting on Google Cloud

Note: This example uses Windows 10, git bash, Google Cloud SDK (gsutil), the Google Cloud console, and the Hugo static site builder. Familiarity with each will help. Hugo is beautiful and elegant if you are a skilled tinkerer. If you are not, or if you fear the command line, just head over to WordPress right now.

For the past two years, my personal web site has (embarrassingly) been on Squarespace – due to 1) laziness and 2) a temporary lapse of reason due to effective marketing. They told me it would be “easy” and so I gave them my money, only to have my personal bias that WYSIWYG editors are the work of the devil confirmed many times over. I’ve been wanting to atone for my sins, but haven’t had the time to think about it because 2020.

But it’s holiday season! And, inspired by datalorax and his new data science teaching site, and with the breezy unencumbered mental space of almost 10 days away from work, I decided it was time to get to work and learn Hugo, the “world’s fastest framework for building websites.” It’s a templating system you can use to generate static websites, and it reminds me a lot about the “object oriented web design” program we built in Perl in 1996 to generate e-commerce product catalogs. As a result, the nostalgia was kind of motivating.

I decided to rebuild my personal web site with Hugo, on Windows 10, and deploy to a GCS bucket that one of my Google Domains would point to, and thus serve my web site. This post talks about the big picture, and I’ll drill down into the more detailed steps at the end of this page so you can follow along if you want to build one too.

After spending two days with Hugo, I give it three (out of five) stars:

It produces super sharp, super clean web sites and there are lots of themes to choose from
Unlike WordPress, all the themes appear to be free
You better be comfortable on the Unix/Linux command line though. (This is for people who want to build a car from scratch rather than going to a dealership and paying full price. Granted, they have turned this process into more of an assembly, where you just have to connect five or six different big pieces to make it all work. But the end product will not be a web site that mere mortal business leaders and content owners can make frequent updates, like they might do on a company web site powered by WordPress.)
You’ll be happier if you know a little HTML, CSS, YAML too
You also need to come prepared with your patience. The giant pieces to assemble are pretty much the same from theme to theme, except for where they’re not, and that’s where you may pull your hair out
If it’s the world’s fastest framework, then there is a huge market opportunity open to deliver on that promise, both for developers and content owners. I’d say WordPress is a faster framework, if you’re willing to put up with its (not ubiquitous) performance problems.

Here’s what you need to do before you start:

Install git bash – you’re going to need a command line that’s more useful than the Windows default
Install the Google Cloud SDK – this is for deployment later
Make sure you can get into Google Cloud Platform via your personal http://console.cloud.google.com link
Buy a domain name from Google Domains

Here are the steps to building and deploying your Hugo web site. Each of these steps will go to its own blog post, so if you don’t see links here, I’m still working on those posts.