How to Install Hugo in 2 Minutes

This evening I was experimenting with static site generators. I’ve been using Jekyll for a while, but I wanted to see what other options were available. I decided to give Hugo a try, since I heard it’s very fast and some of the themes are really nice. Hugo is written in Go, so it’s a single binary that you download and run, which generally makes it easier to install than something like Jekyll, which requires Ruby and quite a few other dependencies.

As I run Arch Linux on my desktop, I’ll show you how to get it up and running on Arch Linux in just a couple of minutes.

Installation

Installing Hugo on Arch Linux is straightforward using pacman:

$ sudo pacman -S hugo

That’s it! To verify the installation:

$ hugo version

At the time of this writing, the version that was installed on my Arch Linux system was as follows:

hugo v0.136.3+extended linux/amd64 BuildDate=unknown

Quick Start

Let’s create a new site:

$ hugo new site myblog
$ cd myblog

Add a theme (using PaperMod as an example):

$ git init
$ git submodule add https://github.com/adityatelange/hugo-PaperMod themes/PaperMod

Enable the theme by adding the following line to the end of hugo.toml:

theme = "PaperMod"

By this point, your hugo.toml file should look like this:

baseURL = "http://example.org/"
languageCode = "en-us"
title = "My New Hugo Site"
theme = "PaperMod"

Create your first post:

$ hugo new posts/my-first-post.md

Start the Hugo development server:

$ hugo server -D

Visit http://localhost:1313 to see your new site!

Here’s a screenshot of what the site looks like for me:

My system is set to dark mode, so the theme is styled accordingly. There’s a theme toggle next to the logo in the top left.

That’s all there is to it. Hugo is now installed and ready for you to start creating content. The -D flag tells Hugo to include draft posts in the preview.

For more information about Hugo’s features and capabilities, check out the official documentation.