published on July 12, 2016

Hello hugo!

I have been wanting to start my blog again for a long time. Github Pages sounded a reliable option and moreover it is free!.

Github pages allows you to host a website directly from your github repository. This means that you do not need to get into the hassles of setting up a server or deal with cloud services like heroku. Just push your code to github and the content gets served from Githubs servers.

With the recent update your content gets served over https but bear in mind that Github Pages is not for anything serious. (Don’t plan to run a social network out of it. You will not be able to do it anyways). You do not get a database with Github Pages. For more information on the features and limitations of Github Pages head here

Github prefers Jekyll to setup your blog, I am using Hugo. Hugo is a static web site generator written in Go. It is just a matter of choice. I am also taking the liberty to simplify the deployment process, for a more cleaner git work flow head here.

Install Hugo on your local machine.
Download and install the package for your operating system from here.
I am using Ubuntu 64 bit and if you are using the same then follow these commands:
$ wget https://github.com/spf13/hugo/releases/download/v0.16/hugo_0.16-1_amd64.deb
$ sudo dpkg -i hugo_0.16-1_amd64.deb
That’s it you are good to go. Check your hugo installation with hugo help
$ hugo help
Setting up your hugo project.
Setup a new hugo project with the command:
$hugo new site blog
This will create a new directory named blog/ with the boiler plate hugo code.
Writing your first post.
You would now want to write a post. Go ahead and do it as follows
$ cd blog/
$ hugo new post/hello-world.md
This will create the file content/post/hello-world.md inside the blog/content/post/ directory. Open this file in the editor of your choice and start writing
```
   +++
   date = "2016-07-12T22:06:43+05:30"
   draft = false
   title = "Hello world"
       
   +++

    Start writing here...
```
Make sure you set draft = false
Test your blog before making it live.
Hugo has an in-built http server that runs on your local machine. This will help you review the content locally before making it live.
$ hugo server
Open you browser and visit http://localhost:1313/
You will see a blank page. This is normal as Hugo needs a theme to render content.
Setting up theme
Hugo has a variety of themes which you can browse online at Hugo Themes. For tutorial purpose we will use hugo_theme_robust.
$ mkdir themes
$ cd themes
$ git clone https://github.com/dim0627/hugo_theme_robust.git
You might want to remove the .git from the theme to avoid conflict with your git repo.
$ rm hugo_theme_robust/.git
Finally add the theme name to hugo config (config.toml)
```
   baseurl="https://username.github.io/"
   languageCode="en-us"
   title="My Blog"
   theme="hugo_theme_robust"
```
Test your blog before you make it live.
Follow step 4
Push your blog to Github
After you have verified your work and are ready to make the content live, you need to build your website locally and push it to github. Hugo website is built by running $ hugo commmand without arguements. If this command is succesful you will see a public/ directory created inside your project. We need to push the contents of this directory to our github pages repo.
$ cd public
$ git init
$ git add .
$ git commit -m "Initial commit!"
$ git remote add origin git@github.com:techmaniack/techmaniack.github.io.git
$ git push origin master

That is it! Go check your beautiful blog on username.github.io