I used Hugo some years ago[1] and my memory of it was mostly negative in terms of usability. I revisited it again this year for another project and it drove me so mad that I ended up switching to Zola[2].
My issue with Hugo was that it just wasn't reliable with what was in the cache so I could never trust whether what I saw was actually the state of the site and causing me to push a broken state to the remote server. Hugo is great if it works but I found it a nightmare to deal with when it doesn't.
There are countless options in Hugo (yes I understand it's powerful but I rather it just had half the option and they work as advertised), some of which at times are contradictory so searching for solutions took me ages. I have no affiliation with the zola project and am not even big on Rust. Zola just worked for me and seems a lot less "hacky" than hugo thanks to the Tera templating system.
The Author of Zola writes on his github:
> [hugo] personally drives me insane, to the point of writing my own template engine and static site generator.
I originally preferred Jekyll to Hugo and this explains why most of the 20 KDE websites are using Jekyll, but I recently fell in love with Hugo.
Hugo was a lot harder to learn, the template engine from Hugo felt very strange for myself coming from Django, Twig and the Jekyll template engines. The template lookup order is complex and for small website this complexity is unnecessary.
When building a large website (kde.org has more than 1400 pages) all these features make sense. I can organize my template in directories, enjoy fast generation time, separating the templating part from the content, create SCSS files for each pages that needs a special layout. There is also a (fast) JS bundler integrated into Hugo. Afaik Zola also doesn't support i18n and Jekyll has a few plugins for that but this is not a build-in functionality.
Same story here. I was looking for a static site gen that was a bit more comfortable than my previous shell scripts around pandoc approach.
I settled on Hugo because it ticked all the boxes and even had org mode support.
The next three nights were horrible. I'm a professional web dev, full stack, I've used dozens of langs, frameworks, probably hundreds of tools. It took me three nights to set up a basic home page for an academic CV and some publication lists. Nothing more. And even then the whole thing was wonky and super unreliable for inscrutable reasons. Big red flag.
I was angry and frustrated, and I started doubting myself.
So I pulled the plug. Tried Zola, I was done in 1.5hrs. Start to finish, just done. Zola is great.
Similar story for me (I also do full stack web dev professionally aswell), but with hugo->Jekyll.
Hours and days struggling with getting Hugo to do what I wanted until I gave up and had a Jekyll site up and running exactly how I wanted it within a few hours.
Who cares about saving 5 seconds site generation time when you lose days pulling your hair out just trying to get the damn thing to do what you want?
I've never felt that site generation time has been a problem for me, although I've only worked on things with 10s-100s of pages, not thousands... But then part of me wonders who it is out there who is doing site-wide updates to x,000 page sites who needs it to happen in 2 seconds? What kind of workflow on a site of that scale can't wait 30 seconds?
I had the exact experience, but I'm not a web developer. Hugo was one of the more frustrating things I ever tried, I converted to Zola in about 2h and it was simple and it simply works.
You know what I did? I just wrote my own site generator in Go in under 200 LOC. I spent 2 hours writing it. It's very basic and does not do many things that these frameworks offer. I currently can create blog posts and pages from markdown. The nice thing about this is that I can just extend my go code as needed without having to (re)learn these frameworks; which is my biggest issue with any frameworks in general.
I looked into moving a static sites from Hugo to Zola a while back, but decided against it because the Zola creator feels very strongly that URLs should never include dates -- to the point that they will not include the option of doing so in Zola [0].
Thanks for saving me from trying Zola. Dates in URLs are a must. I'm on Hugo and complexity is daunting for a personal site, but at least I have dates.
Similar story for me. Another point I find challenging with Hugo is that they very frequently release breaking changes. I want to upgrade because of features or speed, but there are only a few patches per version before there are also breaking changes. These happen so frequently it's hard to keep up.
Zola is less powerful, but does the job and feels much more stable.
Yeah, I had some issues with that. Simplest sites getting broken on updates. Nothing in the changelogs about breaking changes and no fucks given when reported. Still a good generator though.
Trying to get everything on my Mac, GitHub and domain working with Jekyll and Hugo was harder than spinning up Wordpress. Caching is a solved problem on WP, not grokking the love for static site generators.
> My issue with Hugo was that it just wasn't reliable with what was in the cache so I could never trust whether what I saw was actually the state of the site and causing me to push a broken state to the remote server
Did you report these bugs anywhere? Can you be more specific? What were you caching?
If you're caching partials for example, you need to make sure you provide correct caching keys so are you sure it wasn't misuse?
I have a positive view about Hugo, I have deployed it many times successfully and even taught classes using it.
The “disable fast renderer” option (for local development) is indeed a must have, or weird things happen indeed.
My students also found the documentation difficult to grasp in particular regarding the content types and related features (section, bundles, archetypes, ...).
I actually like go templates, so it was never an issue for me.
I was doing image optimization manually but then there weren't much images in my case so that was doable by optimizing sizes/ resolution using Gimp. There are meanwhile better options but it's theme dependent. In hugo this is what I wanted:
This is (unsurpisingly) a difficult problem to solve. I've been trying to help my colleague at Gatsby (a React based framework that uses static site generation) with improvements to the image optimization API Gatsby includes with its image plugins.
Just when you think you've handled every edge case, you have to account for screen pixel densities, better ways to infer sizes and srcSet attributes on picture tags, browsers with or without modern features for loading images in better.. it's no small task!
(I'm obviously biased but I think Gatsby's solution is pretty good now)
>it just wasn't reliable with what was in the cache so I could never trust whether what I saw was actually the state of the site and causing me to push a broken state to the remote server
Can you explain this a bit further? Why would what is/isn't in the cache cause issues? I must be missing something here. I have used Hugo before but not sure what this means exactly.
Funny, just spent this morning working on a Hugo project for the first time in a while, because I just discovered https://netlifycms.org.
I love Hugo and how fast it generates my business site (https://sunboxlabs.com), but having just hired a first (non-technical) writer I had a classic dilemma: either teach them the Hugo command line/markdown or switch to something like Forestry/ButterCMS/Wordpress for a non-technical CMS.
Then I found https://NetlifyCMS.org: You just add an /static/admin/ folder with two files in it and BOOM: non-technical users can create and edit posts with a Wordpress like dashboard (saves as Markdown to Git still). Strongly recommended.
Great question. We basically set every article as a draft, and because they can write in WYSIWIG writer now (no markdown) and the netlifycms admin dashboard allows them to see a fully-rendered preview that gets us 80% of the way.
At that point (once we've checked the links and typos, etc) we flip the draft boolean to false and check the article looks as expected on production.
Not perfect – we'd probably have a staging server if we were bigger – but we're still small :)
Hugo is amazing and I hope that it gets a huge amount of contributors to help improve it—but I wish they would take a couple development cycles to focus on basic functionality like SSL support in the server (for testing PWAs locally on your network), adding a tidy function (has a minify, why not tidy?), and building logic to use directories and files as titles automatically (as well as fixing the weird _index.md requirement) for nested directories.
Thank you for sharing that, I wasn't aware that it was being worked on finally. Looking forward to this one very much. Hopefully SSL support in the server will be next since it is the easiest to implement, then I hope the nested directories thing is resolved. That would make Hugo much more powerful.
If the author is here, could you please link to kde.org in the post? I read this post and had to type it on the browser address bar to check it out.
Also, has the entire kde.org website migrated to Hugo or is it only the Announcements section? The RSS feed linked in the post is for the announcements section alone. More clarity on this in this blog post would be good.
Thanks, I now added a direct link to kde.org in the blog post and I also added a link to the Capacity framework that was used previously.
The entire kde.org website migrated to Hugo. Previously only a very small part was using it (< 10 pages) and this was quite helpful to test if everything worked before porting the rest of the website.
Coincidentally, I just converted a small personal site from Hugo to Jekyll (a custom home page and a handful of blog posts). Took about 3 hours to make the full transition.
Build times went from 10 seconds to 0.2s.
I don't love the template language but once we've coded blog post pagination, head tags, image optimisation etc. it's rare you need much more.
The speed up feels amazing when you're developing, I love that it's a single binary as you know it'll build without issues when you return to it in a few months, and it has enough built in (Sass, minifying, JavaScript bundler, image optimisation) that you just focus on site content rather than procrastinating with your build chain.
Huge fan of Hugo here. My personal site (https://ado.xyz) runs on Hugo and I've deployed a number of others.
For purely static sites, there is nothing better than Hugo imo. Next.js comes in at a close second, and is really handy when you need more than just a static site, but man I can't say enough good things about Hugo.
I use Hugo + org-mode for my blog. It’s native org rendering is very good and works well for posts with inline code using org-babel. I agree with what others have said that Hugo can be a pain to configure. My experience is that it’s dependent on the quality of the site template you start with.
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My issue with Hugo was that it just wasn't reliable with what was in the cache so I could never trust whether what I saw was actually the state of the site and causing me to push a broken state to the remote server. Hugo is great if it works but I found it a nightmare to deal with when it doesn't.
There are countless options in Hugo (yes I understand it's powerful but I rather it just had half the option and they work as advertised), some of which at times are contradictory so searching for solutions took me ages. I have no affiliation with the zola project and am not even big on Rust. Zola just worked for me and seems a lot less "hacky" than hugo thanks to the Tera templating system.
The Author of Zola writes on his github:
> [hugo] personally drives me insane, to the point of writing my own template engine and static site generator.
a sentiment that I share very much.
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20180714043311/https://iotdarwin...
[2] https://github.com/getzola/zola
[3] https://github.com/getzola/after-dark
Hugo was a lot harder to learn, the template engine from Hugo felt very strange for myself coming from Django, Twig and the Jekyll template engines. The template lookup order is complex and for small website this complexity is unnecessary.
When building a large website (kde.org has more than 1400 pages) all these features make sense. I can organize my template in directories, enjoy fast generation time, separating the templating part from the content, create SCSS files for each pages that needs a special layout. There is also a (fast) JS bundler integrated into Hugo. Afaik Zola also doesn't support i18n and Jekyll has a few plugins for that but this is not a build-in functionality.
I settled on Hugo because it ticked all the boxes and even had org mode support.
The next three nights were horrible. I'm a professional web dev, full stack, I've used dozens of langs, frameworks, probably hundreds of tools. It took me three nights to set up a basic home page for an academic CV and some publication lists. Nothing more. And even then the whole thing was wonky and super unreliable for inscrutable reasons. Big red flag.
I was angry and frustrated, and I started doubting myself. So I pulled the plug. Tried Zola, I was done in 1.5hrs. Start to finish, just done. Zola is great.
Hours and days struggling with getting Hugo to do what I wanted until I gave up and had a Jekyll site up and running exactly how I wanted it within a few hours.
Who cares about saving 5 seconds site generation time when you lose days pulling your hair out just trying to get the damn thing to do what you want?
I've never felt that site generation time has been a problem for me, although I've only worked on things with 10s-100s of pages, not thousands... But then part of me wonders who it is out there who is doing site-wide updates to x,000 page sites who needs it to happen in 2 seconds? What kind of workflow on a site of that scale can't wait 30 seconds?
See https://vilkeliskis.com/static/build.go
[0]: https://github.com/getzola/zola/issues/635#issuecomment-5245...
Zola is less powerful, but does the job and feels much more stable.
Did you report these bugs anywhere? Can you be more specific? What were you caching?
If you're caching partials for example, you need to make sure you provide correct caching keys so are you sure it wasn't misuse?
The “disable fast renderer” option (for local development) is indeed a must have, or weird things happen indeed.
My students also found the documentation difficult to grasp in particular regarding the content types and related features (section, bundles, archetypes, ...).
I actually like go templates, so it was never an issue for me.
https://after-dark.habd.as/
but IIRC not all of its image features were available in the theme's zola port https://github.com/getzola/after-dark
Just when you think you've handled every edge case, you have to account for screen pixel densities, better ways to infer sizes and srcSet attributes on picture tags, browsers with or without modern features for loading images in better.. it's no small task!
(I'm obviously biased but I think Gatsby's solution is pretty good now)
Can you explain this a bit further? Why would what is/isn't in the cache cause issues? I must be missing something here. I have used Hugo before but not sure what this means exactly.
I love Hugo and how fast it generates my business site (https://sunboxlabs.com), but having just hired a first (non-technical) writer I had a classic dilemma: either teach them the Hugo command line/markdown or switch to something like Forestry/ButterCMS/Wordpress for a non-technical CMS.
Then I found https://NetlifyCMS.org: You just add an /static/admin/ folder with two files in it and BOOM: non-technical users can create and edit posts with a Wordpress like dashboard (saves as Markdown to Git still). Strongly recommended.
At that point (once we've checked the links and typos, etc) we flip the draft boolean to false and check the article looks as expected on production.
Not perfect – we'd probably have a staging server if we were bigger – but we're still small :)
Also, has the entire kde.org website migrated to Hugo or is it only the Announcements section? The RSS feed linked in the post is for the announcements section alone. More clarity on this in this blog post would be good.
The entire kde.org website migrated to Hugo. Previously only a very small part was using it (< 10 pages) and this was quite helpful to test if everything worked before porting the rest of the website.
Build times went from 10 seconds to 0.2s.
I don't love the template language but once we've coded blog post pagination, head tags, image optimisation etc. it's rare you need much more.
The speed up feels amazing when you're developing, I love that it's a single binary as you know it'll build without issues when you return to it in a few months, and it has enough built in (Sass, minifying, JavaScript bundler, image optimisation) that you just focus on site content rather than procrastinating with your build chain.
Did you mean "from Jekyll to Hugo" instead?
Why is it only Dutch which is capitalized? I'm genuinely curious (my English is not perfect, perhaps there is a rule behind this I don't know).
For purely static sites, there is nothing better than Hugo imo. Next.js comes in at a close second, and is really handy when you need more than just a static site, but man I can't say enough good things about Hugo.