Hugo + gulp.js = Huggle.

Build a highly customizable personal blog blazing fast

  • By Jesse Yang

Introduction

Huggle is a simple demonstation of how to integrate Hugo + gulp.js with multi-language support.

Hugo is a fast and flexible static site generator written in Go. It does an amazing job in organizing, templating and building contents. Gulp.js is a streaming build system (mostly) for front-end code, which is also super fast.

Huggle to Hugo, is much like Octopress to jekyll. But with the ability to reuse what node.js compunity has offered.

You may have seen some equivalents in pure node.js, like Assemble. But unfortunately, they are just not fast enough.

To gain more speed and ease, let’s try Hugo + gulp.js. The two are both designed to be the fastest of its kind.

By running two tasks – generating html from organized markdowns and building programmable css/js, seperately, we gain the maximum speed and flexibility.

What are the benefits?

  • Build a 200+ blogs site in seconds
  • Edit, save, and see live changes in less than one second
  • Write site UI in coffee/stylus/sass/less, anything you like
  • Write browser code like your are in node.js
  • Lightweight client site or pre-rendered syntax highlight

Quick start

  1. Install hugo // Long story short: brew install hugo
  2. Create a site: hugo new site /path/to/site
  3. cd /path/to/site
  4. git clone https://github.com/ktmud/huggle.git themes/huggle
  5. cd themes/huggle && make init

If you want to update the appearance of your site, you can just edit the theme and update source files under “static/assets” and “layouts”.

Dive in

Don’t forget to check out docs on Hugo and gulp.js.

Extras

Syntax Highlighting

Hugo comes with a built in Syntax Highlighting support, based on pygments. To maximize the build speed, Prism.js is used by Huggle, so you can just write Github flavored code block, then render syntax highlighting on the client side.


```javascript
console.log("Give me a Huggle!")
```

The output:

console.log("Give me a Huggle!")

Trouble shooting

Rendering error: html/template: “xxx.html” is an incomplete template

It is because there is grammer error in your golange html template. Remember, you can only use double quote for strings.

{{ template "chrome/includes.html" . }}

Use " instead of ', and blankspace after the . are all mandatory.

Limitations

Hugo is relative new, there are some limitations if you want to try it now:

  1. no pagination support yet
  2. will rebuild the whole site when changes detected by hugo --watch, though total time consumed may be negligible.
  3. no easy way to import a Wordpress/jekyll blog yet.

See the roadmap for what’s missing (and coming) now.

Copyright © 2014 Jesse Yang.  Powered by Huggle