Hugo New Considered Harmful

I’m trying to like Hugo. I really am.

But more and more it seems to me like the only reason this static site generator exists is because, “hey, why not?”. In other words, I am finding that the overhead of using the SSG is quite high, and interfering with my ability to do what I want, leading to me wondering why I am using it at all.

(For reference: as someone coming from a CS background, with some web dev experience, I could trivially make a simple and functional blog by myself, so the value prop for Hugo really seems limited)

Here’s one common issue I ran into recently:

Normally, you create new posts via the hugo new abc.md command. However, from the command line, I try and create posts from the same directory where the deploy.sh script is located. Hence, I often have to specify the directory where I want to create the post: something like

hugo new content/posts/abc.md

As you can probably guess, the issue I encountered was I created the posts in a wrong location. What is double plus bad is that when I do this, sometimes the deploy step fails completely, with a cryptic error message.

Building sites … ERROR 2019/11/10 18:52:22 failed to load data: failed to load data: "C:\my_long_path\hugo_site\data\posts\Hugo-vs-Jekyll.md:1:1": unmarshal of format "" is not supported

It takes a sharp eye to find \data\posts\ !

Anyways, rant over.