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111 lines
4.7 KiB
Markdown
111 lines
4.7 KiB
Markdown
---
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title: "Introduction to Hugo"
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date: "2013-07-01"
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groups: ['gettingStarted']
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linktitle: "Introduction"
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groups_weight: 5
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---
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## What is Hugo?
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Hugo is a general purpose website framework. Technically speaking, Hugo is
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a static site generator. This means that unlike systems like Wordpress,
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Ghost & Drupal which run on your web server expensively building a page
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every time a visitor requests one, Hugo does the building when you create
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your content. Since websites are viewed far more often then they are
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edited, Hugo is optimized for website viewing without sacrificing a great
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writing experience.
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Sites built with hugo are extremely fast and very secure. Hugo sites can
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be hosted anywhere including Heroku, GoDaddy, GitHub pages, S3
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& Cloudfront and work well with CDNs. Hugo sites run without dependencies
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on expensive run times like Ruby, Python or PHP and without dependencies
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on any databases.
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We think of Hugo as the ideal website creation tool. With nearly instant
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built times and the ability to rebuild whenever a change is made Hugo
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provides a very fast feedback loop. This is essential when you are
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designing websites, but also very useful when creating content.
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## What does Hugo do?
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In technical terms Hugo takes a source directory of markdown files and
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templates and uses these as input to create a complete website.
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Hugo boasts the following features:
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* Extremely fast built times (~1ms per page)
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* Runs on Mac OSX, Linux and Windows
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* Content written in [Markdown](/content/example)
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* Easy [installation](/overview/installing)
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* Straightforward website [organization](/content/organization)
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* Completely customizable [homepage](/layout/homepage)
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* Support for different [content types](/content/types)
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* Support for website [sections](/content/sections)
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* Completely customizable [urls](/extras/urls)
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* Render changes [on the fly](/overview/usage) as you develop
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* Host your site anywhere
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* Support for disqus comments
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* Dynamic menu creation
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* Support for TOML, YAML and JSON in [frontmatter](/content/front-matter)
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* [permalink](/extras/permalinks) pattern support
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* [pretty urls](/extras/urls) support
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* [shortcodes](/extras/shortcodes)
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* [Aliases](/extras/aliases) (redirects)
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* Automatic [RSS](/layout/rss) creation
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* Support for both go and amber templates
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* Support for [categories](/indexes/category) and tags
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* Support for configurable [indexes](/indexes/overview) to create your own organization
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* Syntax [highlighting](/extras/highlighting) powered by pygments
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* Ability to [sort content](/content/ordering) as you desire
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* Automatic [table of contents](/extras/toc) generation
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* Automatic and user defined [summaries](/content/summaries)
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* ["Minutes to Read"](/layout/variables) functionality
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* ["Wordcount"](/layout/variables) functionality
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See what's coming next in the [roadmap](/meta/roadmap)
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## Who should use Hugo?
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Hugo is for people that prefer writing in a text editor over
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a browser.
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Hugo is for people who want to hand code their own website without
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worrying about setting up complicated runtimes, dependencies and
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databases.
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Hugo is for people building a blog, company site, portfolio, tumblog,
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documentation, single page site or a site with thousands of
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pages.
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## Why did you write Hugo?
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I wrote Hugo ultimately for a few reasons. First I was disappointed with
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wordpress, my then website solution. It rendered slowly. I couldn't create
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content as efficiently as I wanted to and needed to be online to write
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posts. The constant security updates and the horror stories of people's
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hacked blogs. I hated how content was written in HTML instead of the much
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simpler markdown. Overall I felt like it got in my way more than it helped
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my from writing great content.
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I looked at existing static site generators like Jekyll, Middle and Nanoc.
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All had complicated dependencies to install and took far longer to render
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my blog with hundreds of posts than I felt was acceptable. I wanted
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a framework to be able to get rapid feedback while making changes to the
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templates and the 5+ minute render times was just too slow. In general
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they were also very blog minded and didn't have the ability to have
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different content types and flexible urls.
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I wanted to develop a fast and full featured website framework without
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dependencies. The Go language seemed to have all of the features I needed
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in a language. I began developing Hugo in Go and fell in love with the
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language. I hope you will enjoy using (and contributing to) Hugo as much
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as I have writing it.
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## Next Steps
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* [Install Hugo](/overview/installing)
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* [Quick start](/overview/quickstart)
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* [Join the Mailing List](/community/mailing-list)
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* [Star us on Github](http://github.com/spf13/hugo)
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