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Hugo is an open-source static website generator. It has many themes and many layouts ready to choose from. Content in Hugo consists of posts that you add using markdown format, and the posts are arranged in a logical directory tree structure. See the Hugo site here: Hugo Website.

I put together 3 Hugo sites, using the same set of post files. Have a quick look:

• ice-energy.github.io/jreed
• ice-energy.github.io/user1
• ice-energy.github.io/user9

3 questions you probably have after looking at that:

1. We have a github account?
2. Holy Cow, how’d you do that?
3. How do you keep documents private?

We have a github account?

Yeah, github accounts are free. Pick a username and go. For the free deal, all your repositories are public.

For $99/year, repositories can be made private.

I have the password, I’ll give it to you if you want to host your repository here as well.

How’d you do that?

While Github is known as a source code repository, it is also something else:

If the repository you are storing ALSO happens to be a Static Website, Github can serve up pages from the site.

Chew on that a good long time

IF( uploaded_repo() === github_properly_formatted_website() ) THEN

    Serve_Up_Webpages(siteURL.allow)

END

With proper configuration of the github repository, and proper layout of the data you are storing there, github can serve up the pages. WOWWW!! Friggin’ Awesome!!

With Hugo installed here’s the process I use for creating that website:

• edit content, simple .txt file
• Run Hugo from within a shell script. This generates the entire static site.
• use git to check-in all your changes
• use git to push to github
• wait a bit for changes to show up
• browse to site

How do you keep documents private?

1st of all, pay the $99 fee. That means the repositories are private, but the pages are not. Pages can still be seen.

I have a solution to this, and it’s mainly built into the source code tree.

See the repositories at:

• github.com/ice-energy/jreed
• github.com/ice-energy/user1
• github.com/ice-energy/user9

Look really close at the structure of the 2 content directories.

• content_pub
• content_priv

You can see that each post has it’s own seperate subdirectory, labeled as ‘post_xxx’.

content_pub is meant to have its pages publicly viewed. The output of Hugo is the docs directory.

*docs* is the directory that github looks for to display pages.

content_priv is meant to be private. The output of Hugo for the priv files is the docs_priv directory. github will ignore this directory.

OK here’s the deal: docs_priv is it’s own static site of private docs. It’s ultimately meant to be hosted on an Ice-Energy internal website. I need help from Software and IT to enable that.

A few more notes

See the file x.sh. It’s the shell script that automates the running of Hugo.

Note the use of the -c and the -d arguments in order to control source and destination directories.

Two passes are made of Hugo:

1. Creates publicly viewable directory docs
2. Creates non-viewable directory docs_priv

There’s also some code in x.sh to work around some broken links.

My platform is linux, there’d be just a bit of work to do getting this to run on Windows. x.sh might have to be turned into a .bat file. Haven’t done that yet. Hugo is supposed to run fine on Windows, but again, something I haven’t done yet.

Hugo should also be supported on Mac.

I’d be glad to help anyone get this up and running for themselves. Also, it’s not too difficult to set up different themes from gohugo.io.

JR