Creating a Hugo site from scratch

Patrick Rachford
1 min readJan 28, 2023

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I found the documentation at https://gohugo.io/ to be lacking when it comes to starting a Hugo site from scratch.

There wasn’t much information in the Getting Started section, so I figured I would cover what I do to create a new Hugo site.

Project setup

The first thing I do is navigate to the directory I’m going to create my Hugo project in. For this tutorial, I’ll use a directory called medium.

mkdir medium && cd medium

Now that I’m in my new directory, I’ll check to see if Hugo is installed. If not, run the installation command.

brew install hugo
hugo version
hugo v0.105.0

Create a new project

Now that Hugo is installed, let’s create a new project.

hugo new site .

This command tells Hugo to create a new site in the current directory.

You can list the directory to see what was created.

ls
archetypes content layouts static
config.toml data public themes

Use a theme

Let’s add a theme. If you don’t know what you want, browse through https://themes.gohugo.io/ to find one close to what you want.

In the following example, I used the whisper theme.

hugo new theme <your_theme>
hugo new theme hugo-whisper-theme

Confirm that themes directory was added.

ls
archetypes content layouts resources themes
config.toml data public static

Add content

Let’s add new content in a folder called docs.

hugo new docs/_index.md
Content "content/docs/_index.md" created

Go to your newly created file and add some markdown.

Now enter localhost:1313 in your browser.

Results

You should now see your text in the browser.

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