Hugo Workflow

I recently ported my pretty defunct blog over to Hugo, after some considerable searching about the best option for my needs. I wanted to be able to work with R Markdown files, but not have to mess too much with the internals. I had messed around with Blogdown a couple years ago, and thought it may be a good starting place. The issue is that I don’t want to have to work in RStudio for all of my website work. I have some R Markdown files, but I doubt it’s going to be a huge part of the blog, and I would prefer to use a different editor.

After poking around a bit into Blogdown and Hugo, I came to a nice workflow. I only need to run the Blogdown functions when I need to render a new R Markdown file, and I can use the native Hugo commands from the terminal or whatever editor I’m using. So I made a really simple Makefile for the different tasks I may need to run:

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.PHONY: build-and-serve clean-public rmd rmd-serve
PUBLIC_DIR = public

build-and-serve:
	hugo && hugo server

rmd: 
	Rscript -e "blogdown::build_site()"

rmd-serve: rmd
	hugo server

clean-public:
	rm -rf $(PUBLIC_DIR)

I can continue to just use hugo to quickly build the site, but I added a command for build-and-serve to automatically launch the local server. I’ve got an rmd command to run the R code to render the .Rmd files into HTML and build the site (it calls hugo internally, so I don’t have to include that as a separate command). And I made an rmd-serve command to render the file and run the server.

It’s a really simple, pretty blunt tool, but it’s really helpful. And it’s my first time really working with Makefiles, so it’s a nice, easy introduction.

In the future I’ll probably add a command to deploy the site as well, but it’s easy enough to just do it through git for now.

See also