Quality and Innovation

Hugo is a static web site generator. What that means is: it provides you with lots of templates, variables that you may want to see reappear throughout your site (and when changed once, update everywhere – like author name), and an engine that turns those templates into a lightning fast web site. That way, you can focus on the content rather than the presentation.

With Hugo, you will definitely be focusing on both though. But there’s a payoff: your website will be gorgeous, and even other people will notice (pretty much immediately) that it’s blazing fast. These steps assume that you have git bash installed, and that you’re working on Windows 10.

Step 1 – Open git bash and create a directory for all your Hugo adventures. Mine is on my D drive, but yours might be on C:

mkdir /d/Hugo

Step 2 – Download the Hugo executable to your machine, and put it in that directory you just created. Then, unzip all the contents into that same directory.

Step 3 – Add your new Hugo directory to the Windows PATH. Type env in the search bar at the bottom left of your screen and hit enter. On the window that pops up, click the Environment Variables button. In the bottom window, find the row that starts with Path and click it. Next, click Edit, then New. At the bottom of the list, add D:\Hugo (but put the directory YOU created on your machine! And be very careful about the direction of the slash).

Step 4 – Open git bash and type hugo version, then hit Enter. If you see a message like this one, Hugo is ready to go!

User@DESKTOP-4H0EUDG MINGW64 /d/Hugo (master)
$ hugo version
Hugo Static Site Generator v0.79.1-EDB9248D windows/amd64 BuildDate: 2020-12-19T15:44:19Z

…to be continued in next post