Dennis Lee

The first version of this site used Jekyll as a static site generator, but now I’m using Hugo.

Why?

Here are some reasons why I switched to Hugo (and why I like it more than Jekyll) in no particular order:

Build Dependencies

When using Jekyll, you have to pull in all of these different packages using RubyGems, a package manager for Ruby. Dare I say… bloat? In contrast, Hugo is just a single package, with an optional dependency for syntax highlighting code blocks (in pure HTML¹)!

And this isn’t just a speed concern either (although it is, having to download a bunch of large packages before being able to do literally anything). Having so many dependencies very often put me in dependency hell when working with things like templates and plugins and themes from different sources. Oh, and speaking of themes:

Themes

The way Hugo handles theming is far saner than the way Jekyll does. In Jekyll, you use either the default minima theme or install a different one (via RubyGems), and then if you want to customize parts of the theme, you place modified versions of the relevant files locally in your site which then take precedence over the default ones. But if you’re installing the theme in packaged form, where are the files that you’re basing your edits on?

In contrast, Hugo themes are always just a subfolder of /themes/. So just go there and make your edits with the full context around you. Without the pointless separation between source and packaged forms, the separation between user-specific and general data is far easier to achieve and mantain.

Speed

The build process with Hugo is just faster. Chad compiled language vs. virgin interpreted language.

Naming/Organization

The names of all of the important files and folders in Jekyll all begin with a leading _, like _config.yml. I don’t know how someone ever thought this was a good idea. Maybe they needed to make them stand out because there’s too much stuff that goes in the root folder (up to 6 or so files for the package management alone, in some extreme cases!), plus the favicon and any page that doesn’t belong in /_posts/).

Anyway, Hugo has none of the above problems (all pages go in /content/, favicon in /static/,…).

blogdown

I recently found out about this thing called blogdown, which generates webpages from R Markdown. It has some support for Jekyll and Hexo, but mostly targets Hugo. I don’t know if I’ll actually use this, but it’s nice to know I have the option.

Hugo actually has more features!

• Hugo has internationalization (i18n) functionality built in. Jekyll doesn’t. If you’re still going to use Jekyll though, try this.
• Hugo actually lets you change the structure of your site beyond just putting posts in /_posts/ and everything else in /.
• Hugo’s local webserver (used when you are testing your site) has live-reloading built in (via injected JavaScript). So you don’t have to keep refreshing manually.

Why not?

But there are, unfortunately, some things I’m missing in Hugo:

Structure/Organization

With Jekyll, you put a file named like YYYY-MM-DD-slug into /_posts/ and it sets the date and title automatically. Hugo makes me specify title and date manually, even when using the aforementioned format.² And if I want punctuation in my title (like in this post), I even have to specify the slug manually, because otherwise it auto-generates the slug with the punctuation intact! At least Hugo has some nice automation functionality for creating new pages, though… Update 2020-05-24: Actually, this can be fixed completely, see my newer post for details.

Jekyll literally actually BTFO forever with FACTS and LOGIC

There are a few reasons I decided to use Jekyll at first, but after using Hugo, I no longer think any of them are good reasons:

Portability

Originally I had this website hosted on GitLab Pages (which supports literally any static site generator), but I figured I might want to switch to GitHub Pages (which only supports Jekyll) at some point. It turns out I was right about that, but I was wrong to let it influence my static site generator decision. You see, there’s this thing called Netlify, and you can just give it your website (via GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket, or direct file transfer) and it’ll automatically rebuild whenever something changes. And yes, it even supports private repositiories, unlike GitHub Pages! I have more to say about Netlify and about GitHub vs. GitLab, but that’s better saved for separate posts.

Extensibility (Plugins)

It’s true: Jekyll has plugins and Hugo doesn’t. But I haven’t actually thought of something Hugo can’t do that Jekyll accomplishes with plugins. As mentioned before, Hugo already has internationalization/i18n built in. The only Jekyll plugin I ever actually used was jekyll-email-protect. But in that case, you can just generate the obfuscated email offline and use that (which is better anyway if you ever want to make the source repository of your website public, as I have). Percent encoding for the link, code points for the text.

Flexibility

Uhh, I put this here when I was writing other parts of the page to remind myself of something, but now I don’t remember what I was supposed to write here. Oh well.

Conclusion

Well, I’ve already spent a lot more time writing this than I expected. Hopefully I didn’t forget anything. Later I’ll post more about website building. I’ll tell you about non-garbage static site themes that are actually good and don’t require tons of JavaScript for basic functionality or anything while still looking A E S T H E T I C and stuff.