A couple of weeks ago I was proud of myself for switching from RVM to rbenv. The reason I made the switch was that I wanted something light-weight and I didn’t like the RVM installation process, in particular the need to use the GPG command line tool.

The problem was that after I installed a fresh copy of Ruby 2.4.0 with rbenv, I wasn’t able to deploy this blog using my very old version of Octopress. I got an error that some specific version of a gem was not available. The gem that it couldn’t find must have been a dependency of one of the other gems. Anyway, I wsa stuck, unable to update my blog. I had been meaning to move off of Octopress anyway, since it had been so long since I set it up I was worried that if I moved to a new computer I’d be stuck. This gem problem was as good an impetus as any. (Though note I believe there is a newer version of Octopress out there.)

After not doing any research (which is unlike me) and sending a random call out tweet, I decided on Hugo. The only way I had heard of it was because the Ricochet IM site uses it. I like those developers, so I figured they had chosen a good, new static site generator. Plus it’s written in GoLang so it must be good, right? So earlier tonight I dove into the docs.

If you’re thinking about making the transition from Octopress to Hugo, you may want to checkout octohug. I ended up doing it by hand / Vim macros.

For now I’m using the Beautiful Hugo theme… think it looks pretty good! Unfortunately the URL structure is different than when I used Octopess, so any and all external and even internal links are going to be busted. I’ll try to fix them as I find them. I also decided to wipe my tag data cuz I was lazy making the transition. The only thing left to do is to add Disqus comments.

For posterity, here are some notes I took when I made the move:

Setting Up the Hugo Blog

I went here and followed the instructions under “Hosting Personal/Organization Pages”.

  1. Delete sts10.github.io repo from Github
  2. Create on Github “blog-hugo” repo. This is going to be the larger repo, aka the Hugo home directory. Add remote to current blog-hugo directory.
  3. Preview it with hugo server.
  4. In my reading of the instructions linked to above, I thought I was supposed to run rm -rf public at this point, but that ended up derailing the git submodule step for me?
  5. Create on Github “sts10.github.io” repo
  6. git submodule add -b master git@github.com:sts10/sts10.github.io.git public
  7. Set up the suggested deploy.sh script, adding the -t flag and your chosen theme.
  8. ./deploy.sh "Your optional commit message"

Creating a New Post

hugo new post/good-to-great.md

Then go open the file and edit it in your preferred text editor.

Preview Changes/ New Posts

hugo server

Deploying new blog

/.deploy.sh

Then, optionally, commit and push the home (bigger) repo.