Getting Started with Hugo for Technical Blogging

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 10:00:00 +0300

Hugo is one of the fastest static site generators available, and it is particularly well-suited for technical blogs. In this post, we will walk through why Hugo stands out and how to get a blog running from zero.

Why Hugo?

There are plenty of static site generators to choose from — Jekyll, Eleventy, Astro, Next.js — but Hugo has a few properties that make it compelling for engineering blogs:

Speed. Hugo builds are measured in milliseconds, not seconds. A site with hundreds of posts still builds in under a second.
Single binary. No Node.js, no Ruby, no Python runtime. Install one binary and you are done.
Batteries included. Taxonomies, RSS, sitemaps, syntax highlighting, and image processing are all built in.

Installation

On macOS with Homebrew:

brew install hugo

Verify the installation:

hugo version

Creating a Site

hugo new site my-blog
cd my-blog

Adding a Theme

Hugo has a rich theme ecosystem. For a clean, professional look, PaperMod is an excellent choice:

git submodule add https://github.com/adityatelange/hugo-PaperMod.git themes/PaperMod

Then set theme = 'PaperMod' in your hugo.toml.

Writing Your First Post

hugo new content posts/my-first-post/index.md

This creates a new post using the archetype template, pre-filled with frontmatter fields for date, tags, categories, and more.

What’s Next

Once you have the basics running, there is a lot more to explore — custom shortcodes, deployment pipelines, and content organization strategies. Check out the post on Docker Compose for local development for an example of how we structure technical content on this blog.