$ ❯ CrowderSoup

Last night I got the wild hare to migrate my personal site from Pelican to Hugo. I’ve been meaning to do it for a while now, so to give myself the push I needed to get it done I deleted my old personal site from Github.

Differences

Front Matter

Honestly the biggest different for content is “front matter”. Both Hugo and Pelican, as static site generators, use front matter to describe pieces of content.

Front matter for Pelican might look something like this:

Title: Blog Post Title
Date: 2017-11-29 23:51:34

Whereas Hugo’s would look like this:

+++
title = "Blog Post Title"
date = "2017-11-29 23:51:34"
+++

As you can see it’s pretty similar. I don’t have too many posts on my blog so it was easy to go through and manually update each one. If I had more posts I probably would have written a script to make the conversion for me.

Fold Structure

This likely doesn’t come as a surprise, but just as the front matter format isn’t compatible neither is the project fold structure. Pelican keeps everything you’re going to render under the content folder. Under that content folder you have folders for posts, pages, and static content. Something like this:

- content
    - posts
        - welcome.md
    - pages
        - about.md
    - assets
        - style.css

Hugo likes to keep only real content under the content folder. Hugo also makes no assumptions about the TYPE of content your site will have. Each file represents a node in your site-map. How those nodes are rendered as your site is up to your theme!

Hugo does allow for static content though. It lives, simply, under the static folder at the root of your site. For me, this meant copying not only the actual content from content/posts and content/pages just Hugo’s content folder, but also moving content/assets to static in Hugo.

Themes

One of the things that drew me to Hugo was how powerful a Hugo theme is. As I said before, a Hugo theme actually dictates the structure in which your content will be rendered. A theme can describe a set of default layouts for list pages, single pages, etc. It can also override the layout of any individual page.

Hugo themes can be as simple or verbose as you choose. Pelican themes require more files, and generally seemed less flexible to me. Though, this may have been due simply to my own implementation.

Hugo’s advantages

Speed

Purely anecdotal, but Hugo feels much faster than Pelican. This site (while small) builds in less than 20ms. It’s not so much that Pelican was slow, it’s just that Hugo is so much faster.

Flexibility

Hugo has baked in i18n support. It has support for building multiple content types (JSON, AMP, etc.). It supports whatever taxonomies, content types, and menus you can dream up. A number of shortcodes are baked in and ready to use in your markdown, and you can write as many custom ones as you want.

Bottom line, I’ve found Hugo to be far more flexible than Pelican.

Other Non Hugo Vs Pelican Changes

One of the biggest changes I’ve made to this site is that it’s now run out of a single git repository hosted on Github. Github now let’s you host a repositories “Github Pages” site out of a subfolder instead of the root of the repo or a special “gh-pages” branch. This is not without caveats though:

1. The repo cannot follow the “username.github.io” or “project.github.io” naming scheme.
2. The subfolder must be named docs, not public which is what hugo renders to by default.

These are both easily solvable problems. Name your repo something like “Personal-Site” and set publishDir = "docs" in your config.toml. I used a custom domain for my site as well so I really don’t care what the repo is called because the URL is whatever I set in the CNAME file in the repo root.

You can check out the repo for this site here

Disclaimer

Okay, so if you’ve made it this far you may be thinking to yourself “Hey, this guy didn’t include any actual data to back up his claims!“. And that’s on purpose. I tested and used Pelican extensively myself and decided I like Hugo better. But anyone can fake benchmarks. That’s why I think they’re rubbish. Pelican may be the right choice for you, which is why I encourage you to give it a go! I picked Hugo in the end, but you may not!