As I start to add more and more content to my site, it makes sense to bring in some kind of templating system, so I’m not having to manually craft a lot of boilerplate for each page.

After looking at various options I settled on Hugo, because:

• It’s super quick
• It still allows you to custom-craft HTML if you need to
• It’s fairly popular, so lots of documentation and StackOverflow answers available

Directory layout

My layout follows the Hugo defaults pretty closely. I defined the theme and layout at the top-level rather than adding the additional layer of abstraction of themes.

Teething issues

I ran into a few problems with getting Hugo working the way I wanted it to. The hugo documentation is very basic and the starter projects include a fair bit of boilerplate that isn’t well explained.

• Necessary Templates - the Hugo quickstart project has a whole bunch of partials, but the essential ones are:
  • index.html
  • 404.html
  • _default/baseof.html
  • _default/list.html
  • _default/single.html
• CSS and JS - if you’re not using a theme, should sit in the top-level static folder - all resources in static are available at the website root.
• Content pages - you need a few _index.md pages to list the posts available at each level.