Victor Hugo

A Hugo boilerplate for creating truly epic websites

This is a boilerplate for using Hugo as a static site generator and Webpack as your asset pipeline.

Victor Hugo setup to use PostCSS and Babel for CSS and JavaScript compiling/transpiling.

This project is released under the MIT license. Please make sure you understand its implications and guarantees.

Usage

❗ Prerequisites

You need to have the latest/LTS node and npm versions installed in order to use Victor Hugo.

Next step, clone this repository and run:

npm install

This will take some time and will install all packages necessary to run Victor Hugo and its tasks.

👷 Development

While developing your website, use:

npm start

or for developing your website with hugo server --buildDrafts --buildFuture, use:

npm run preview

Then visit http://localhost:3000/ - or a new browser windows popped-up already - to preview your new website. Webpack Dev Server will automatically reload the CSS or refresh the whole page, when stylesheets or content changes.

📦 Static build

To build a static version of the website inside the /dist folder, run:

npm run build

To get a preview of posts or articles not yet published, run:

npm run build:preview

See package.json for all tasks.

Structure

|--site                // Everything in here will be built with hugo
|  |--content          // Pages and collections - ask if you need extra pages
|  |--data             // YAML data files with any data for use in examples
|  |--layouts          // This is where all templates go
|  |  |--partials      // This is where includes live
|  |  |--index.html    // The index page
|  |--static           // Files in here ends up in the public folder
|--src                 // Files that will pass through the asset pipeline
|  |--css              // Webpack will bundle imported css separately
|  |--index.js         // index.js is the webpack entry for your css & js assets

Basic Concepts

You can read more about Hugo's template language in their documentation here:

https://gohugo.io/templates/overview/

The most useful page there is the one about the available functions:

https://gohugo.io/templates/functions/

For assets that are completely static and don't need to go through the asset pipeline, use the site/static folder. Images, font-files, etc, all go there.

Files in the static folder end up in the web root. So a file called site/static/favicon.ico will end up being available as /favicon.ico and so on...

The src/index.js file is the entrypoint for webpack and will be built to /dist/main.js

You can use ES6 and use both relative imports or import libraries from npm.

Any CSS file imported into the index.js will be run through Webpack, compiled with PostCSS Next, and minified to /dist/[name].[hash:5].css. Import statements will be resolved as part of the build.

Environment variables

To separate the development and production - aka build - stages, all gulp tasks run with a node environment variable named either development or production.

You can access the environment variable inside the theme files with getenv "NODE_ENV". See the following example for a conditional statement:

{{ if eq (getenv "NODE_ENV") "development" }}You're in development!{{ end }}

All tasks starting with build set the environment variable to production - the other will set it to development.

Deploying to Netlify

Push your clone to your own GitHub repository.
Create a new site on Netlify and link the repository.

Now Netlify will build and deploy your site whenever you push to git.

You can also click this button:

DavidForster/victor-hugo