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4107fd50a8
General revisions to (hopefully) make the documentation easier to understand and more comprehensive. Revise "Strange EOF error" troubleshooting page to say that a fix is in place for the upcoming Hugo v0.13. Also add more external links, and cute icons from Font Awesome.
139 lines
5.7 KiB
Markdown
139 lines
5.7 KiB
Markdown
---
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date: 2013-07-01
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linktitle: Introduction
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menu:
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main:
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parent: getting started
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next: /overview/quickstart
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title: Introduction to Hugo
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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 and 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 while providing 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][], [DreamHost][],
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[GitHub Pages][], [Amazon S3][] and [CloudFront][], and work well with CDNs.
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Hugo sites run without dependencies on expensive runtimes like Ruby,
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Python or PHP and without dependencies on any databases.
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[Heroku]: https://www.heroku.com/
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[GoDaddy]: https://www.godaddy.com/
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[DreamHost]: http://www.dreamhost.com/
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[GitHub Pages]: http://www.dreamhost.com/cloud/
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[Amazon S3]: http://aws.amazon.com/s3/
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[CloudFront]: http://aws.amazon.com/cloudfront/ "Amazon CloudFront"
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We think of Hugo as the ideal website creation tool. With nearly instant
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build 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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### General
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* Extremely fast build times (~1 ms per page)
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* Completely cross platform: Runs on <i class="fa fa-apple"></i> Mac OS X, <i class="fa fa-linux"></i> Linux, <i class="fa fa-windows"></i> Windows, and more!
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* Easy [installation](/overview/installing)
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* Render changes [on the fly](/overview/usage) with [LiveReload](/extras/livereload) as you develop
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* Complete theme support
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* Host your site anywhere
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### Organization
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* Straightforward [organization](/content/organization)
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* Support for [website sections](/content/sections)
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* Completely customizable [URLs](/extras/urls)
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* Support for configurable [taxonomies](/indexes/overview) which includes categories and tags. Create your own custom organization of content
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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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* Dynamic menu creation
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* [Pretty URLs](/extras/urls) support
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* [Permalink](/extras/permalinks) pattern support
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* [Aliases](/extras/aliases) (redirects)
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### Content
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* Content written in [Markdown](/content/example)
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* Support for TOML, YAML and JSON metadata in [frontmatter](/content/front-matter)
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* Completely [customizable homepage](/layout/homepage)
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* Support for multiple [content types](/content/types)
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* Automatic and user defined [summaries](/content/summaries)
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* [Shortcodes](/extras/shortcodes) to enable rich content inside of Markdown
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* ["Minutes to Read"](/layout/variables) functionality
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* ["Wordcount"](/layout/variables) functionality
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### Additional Features
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* Integrated [Disqus](https://disqus.com/) comment support
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* Automatic [RSS](/layout/rss) creation
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* Support for [Go](http://golang.org/pkg/html/template/), [Amber](https://github.com/eknkc/amber) and [Ace](http://ace.yoss.si/) HTML templates
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* Syntax [highlighting](/extras/highlighting) powered by [Pygments](http://pygments.org/)
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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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me from writing great content.
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I looked at existing static site generators like [Jekyll][], [Middleman][] 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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[Jekyll]: http://jekyllrb.com/
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[Middleman]: https://middlemanapp.com/
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[nanoc]: http://nanoc.ws/
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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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[Go language]: http://golang.org/ "The Go Programming Language"
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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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* [Discussion Forum](http://discuss.gohugo.io)
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