Setting up Hugo locally and choosing a theme

Part 2 of Moving from WordPress to Hugo

Setting up Hugo

Very little to add to the official instructions

I use a Windows laptop, so at first I tried the Chocolatey installation, however this only installs standard Hugo. The theme I chose requires the extended version of Hugo, so I uninstalled the Chocolatey build and re-installed as a direct download.

Add the install directory to the path environment variable, reboot, and you’re ready to go.

Choosing a theme

A quick browse around the Hugo templates and theme creation documentation convinced me that if I started trying to write a theme from scratch it would extend this project significantly.

Luckily there’s a large choice of community themes already available for Hugo. After bit of clicking around, and trying a couple locally, I decided to go for the Academic theme from George Cushen because it seemed to be both full-featured yet very flexible.

Again, there are excellent installation instructions for the theme and the provided kickstart site so I won’t document the detail here.

The initial configuration tasks were based on the instructions:

1. Edit the files in /config
2. Edit the /content/home/about.md page
3. Edit the /content/authors settings
4. Create some test content
5. Copy the contents of /themes/academic/archetypes to /archetypes
   (didn’t see this one in the instructions but without it the archetypes don’t get picked up on hugo new -kind post post/mypost)

Then

hugo server -D

and check the site at http://localhost:1313