How to create Blog and Portfolio with Hugo : From A-to-Z

It has been long time since i wanted to start a blog and host it with my own Custom domain.Truth to be told , I am a lazy blogger - I only write occasionally.

Originally I wanted to setup my blog on Wordpress but configuring and hosting a blog on VPS server (no mater how cheap) , requires regular maintenance on monthly basis.

Add that with Keeping server up-to-date to avoid any risks, backups etc... just seems extra work that i really don't want to do.

Other option was host a blog on Blogger and redirect to custom domain. which again didn't seem right because external dependency on Google.(They can remove your blog without any warning if they feel like it. Doesn't matter if they actually do or don't, but they can)

Now being from Technical background and my curiosity to learn , I turned to Static site generators. I have heard some great thing about Hugo so thought why not give it a try.

Hogo is a great choice as it has Github pages support and i can host entire thing for free with Github.

Setting up Hugo server locally.

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Installing Hugo

There is entire section dedicated to installation for different environment detailed instructions .

Selecting Theme

after browsing some themes (and there are too many themes) i decided to go with silhouette-hugo.

Creating a new project template and forking a theme.

hugo new site SITENAME
cd SITENAME/themes
git clone https://github.com/mattbutton/silhouette-hugo.git

Adding the theme to project's config file.

cd..
echo 'theme = "silhouette-hugo"' >> config.toml

Starting the Hugo server locally

Hugo server

Once the Hugo is started ,site can be previewed on http://localhost:1313

Changing the site data

Go to config.toml file of your project's main directory and from there you can change your sites configuration data like baseurl , title of site , social links etc...

Using some CSS to slightly change look and feel of theme.

Navigate to SITENAME/themes/silhouette-hugo/assets/css

Here resides the styles.css file. you can change the style of the theme by editing this file.

From this

To this

I made a stupid mistake by editing the original theme and adding my own css with this.

Learn from my mistake and make a note of this , never ever ever edit the original files when you are using third part library/theme. Instead create your own new file and reference it.

[ One of the thing i love most about hugo is the instant changes in html page without any refresh. You could see the data changes in website as soon as you change/add css property.]

As Sites created with HUGO will be static site and Github provides a free hosting for static website, we are going to use Github Pages.

Read more at

Creating a blog with Hugo static site Generator

Hosting Hugo site on Github Pages with Custom Domain