02 – What is Hugo?

Hugo is an open source static site generator written in Go (also known as Golang). Go is designed to be a high-performance programming language. Hugo claims to be the world’s fastest static website engine.

And it is fast. Even if you have thousands of content pages in your website, Hugo may take only a few seconds to generate your production-ready pages and assets.

Content for Hugo is typically written in Markdown, which is a popular lightweight markup language. Markdown contains only a small number of formatting elements, which encourages the user to write well-structured documents that doesn’t mix code or styling, as HTML documents often do.

Hugo doesn’t provide a graphical user interface out of the box. That doesn’t mean you need to be a coder to use Hugo, but it does mean that the content creators for your website should be familiar with using a text editor and comfortable with Markdown.

If that’s a problem for your content writers, there are open source Markdown editors available to make the writing process more pleasant. You can use a third-party frontend editor with Hugo. More about that in a future article.

As the website administrator, you don’t need to be fluent in Go, but Hugo template functions use Go syntax and some of Go’s built-in language functions. Don’t worry: most of the functions accept just one or two arguments, and will be easy to understand once you learn the basic syntax.

Hugo is available for Linux, Windows, macOS, FreeBSD, and OpenBSD. This tutorial assumes that you are familiar working in a command line terminal.