Creating your own site with Academic Hugo

The Academic Theme for Hugo allows you to easily create a website using markdown and/or jupyter files. This blog-post is just a personal test, but might be useful for beginners wanting to create their site.

Setup

Go to a working fork of the academic-kickstart github repository and fork the repository. Note that the version I provide on my github is compatible with the instructions on this blogpost. You can try forking the latest academic-kickstart github repository but be aware you might have to use another hugo version than the one provided on this guide.

Now download the content with:

$ mkdir my-site && \
    wget -O - https://github.com/github-username/academic-kickstart/tarball/master | \
    tar xz -C my-site --strip-components 1

Replace my-site with the name of the repository that will contain your site’s code (optional) and github-username with your github username (or use rhdzmota if you didn’t fork the repo).

Install hugo (select your version here). For debian-based distributions:

$ sudo apt install wget && \
    wget -O hugo.deb 'https://github.com/gohugoio/hugo/releases/download/v0.55.6/hugo_extended_0.55.6_Linux-64bit.deb' && \
    sudo dpkg -i hugo.deb

Note that academic version 4.3.1+ requires hugo-extended 0.55.6+.

Verify your installation by running: hugo version.

Now enter your site’s directory and create the git-repository:

$ cd my-site && \
    rm -rf themes/academic .gitmodules && 
    git init && git submodule add https://github.com/gcushen/hugo-academic themes/academic 

You should be able to preview the site with: hugo serve -D

For now on, feel free to configure your site. You can see a live example here with the github code here.

Publishing with github pages

Add the following line anywhere on config/_default/config.toml:

publishDir = "docs"

Now when running hugo on the commandline, a docs directory will appear. This directory contains a set of static files that can be directly published to github pages.

Just configure your repository in github and push into master. More documentation here. Integration with custom domains guide here and here.