Hugo on Mint

I author this labs blog in Jekyll, but my personal blog uses the Hugo static site generator. Jekyll has wonderful plugin support, but it’s incredibly slow. My meager labs blog takes a full minute to compile. Hugo is written in Go and is screaming fast. Thousands of post? BAM compiled in less than a second. It’s all driven by a single binary, too. No external dependencies to worry about. No obscure ruby gems that don’t version together well. It’s got a powerful templating engine and it’s easy to customize.

I’ve been writing my blog on a Macbook Air where I had installed hugo with homebrew:

brew install hugo

This morning I had to make a fix on a post on my Linux Mint laptop, though. I cloned down my blog from Github and I installed hugo the way I’d imagine I should:

sudo apt install hugo

Only it seems that the version that apt installs is criminally outdated. When I tried compiling my blog I got hundreds of errors about incomplete templates. I needed a more recent version of Hugo.

The Hugo documentation, if you read it, will try to talk you into installing via snap, or failing that, compile with go and govendor. I tried both methods and failed miserably. Finally I saw a post that said, “Just download the .deb release from Github, dummy!” Yeah, that totally works.

So there you have it. Need hugo on Ubuntu or Mint? Grab the .deb of the latest release from Github and you’re good to go.