Step 1: Install Hugo

brew install hugo
# or
port install hugo

To verify your new install:

hugo version

Step 2: Create a New Site

hugo new site quickstart

The above will create a new Hugo site in a folder named quickstart.

Step 3: Add a Theme

See themes.gohugo.io for a list of themes to consider. This quickstart uses the beautiful Ananke theme.

First, download the theme from GitHub and add it to your site’s themes directory:

cd quickstart
git init
git submodule add https://github.com/theNewDynamic/gohugo-theme-ananke.git themes/ananke

Note for non-git users:

Then, add the theme to the site configuration:

echo theme = \"ananke\" >> config.toml

Step 4: Add Some Content

You can manually create content files (for example as content/<CATEGORY>/<FILE>.<FORMAT>) and provide metadata in them, however you can use the new command to do a few things for you (like add title and date):

hugo new posts/my-first-post.md

Edit the newly created content file if you want, it will start with something like this:

---
title: "My First Post"
date: 2019-03-26T08:47:11+01:00
draft: true
---

Step 5: Start the Hugo server

Now, start the Hugo server with drafts enabled:

▶ hugo server -D

                   | EN
+------------------+----+
  Pages            | 10
  Paginator pages  |  0
  Non-page files   |  0
  Static files     |  3
  Processed images |  0
  Aliases          |  1
  Sitemaps         |  1
  Cleaned          |  0

Total in 11 ms
Watching for changes in /Users/bep/quickstart/{content,data,layouts,static,themes}
Watching for config changes in /Users/bep/quickstart/config.toml
Environment: "development"
Serving pages from memory
Running in Fast Render Mode. For full rebuilds on change: hugo server --disableFastRender
Web Server is available at http://localhost:1313/ (bind address 127.0.0.1)
Press Ctrl+C to stop

Navigate to your new site at http://localhost:1313/.

Feel free to edit or add new content and simply refresh in browser to see changes quickly (You might need to force refresh in webbrowser, something like Ctrl-R usually works).

Step 6: Customize the Theme

Your new site already looks great, but you will want to tweak it a little before you release it to the public.

Site Configuration

Open up config.toml in a text editor:

baseURL = "https://example.org/"
languageCode = "en-us"
title = "My New Hugo Site"
theme = "ananke"

Replace the title above with something more personal. Also, if you already have a domain ready, set the baseURL. Note that this value is not needed when running the local development server.

For theme specific configuration options, see the theme site.

For further theme customization, see Customize a Theme.

Step 7: Build static pages

It is simple. Just call:

hugo -D

Output will be in ./public/ directory by default (-d/--destination flag to change it, or set publishdir in the config file).