Migrate to Hugo

A couple of weeks ago, I moved this site over from WordPress to Hugo, a static site generator. I’ve written a little bit about why I made the switch, how I automated deployment of my site, and how I’m able to automatically publish prescheduled posts at the right time. Today, I wanted to talk about something a bunch of people have asked me about: how to actually migrate content from WordPress into Hugo.

In this article, I document some non-technical things I’ve learned migrating my blog from Jekyll to Hugo. The gist is to keep it as simple as possible:

WordPress is a fantastic CMS that powers a big chunk of websites out there, which all have different features. As a result, it has a pretty robust architecture that can feel a bit too complex to run a simple blog. In this article, Christopher Kirk-Nielsen will go over how he made the transition from WordPress to a specific static site generator named Hugo. Let’s have a look at how Hugo can help us create a blog that is simple and fast!

TL;DR: Migrating my website from Drupal 7 to Hugo Jump directly to the end titled Migration to Hugo Initial website Looking back at my website’s history, the domain was first registered sometime in 2003. Back then, it was mostly a couple of html pages. Being (and still) a novice in web, my website was mostly on ideas from others. IIRC, for the bare html one, I took a lot of look wise details from Miss Garrels’ website.

Sometimes I play around with Tails and on rare occasions I also build a Tails image myself. One thing that makes the build of Tails a bit tedious is that it a also builds the Tails Website, which contains the whole documentation (which is really cool, because that way users have the most up to date documentation on their desktop!). The problem is, that the website takes a looooong time to build- on my Laptop (i7-5600U) it takes around 11 minutes.

After years of struggling with jekyll’s limitations and idiosyncracies, today I moved to hugo. It took several hours. Importing content The Migrate to Hugo page suggests a few tools. First I tried the jekyll import command built-in. It moved the posts correctly. But the filename retained the date prefix as in jekyll. And I wasn’t sure if the date was correctly captured in frontmatter. Then I looked at the JekyllToHugo tool. It was just a simple python file. I liked this because I could change the behaviour to my liking. In fact, I did change a lot. I’m attaching the modified version of this at the end of this post.

📔 Intro # When I started this blog in 2015 it was more to learn than to actually write anything. WordPress was easy enough to set up and maintain along with the plethora of plugins to mess with.

Electronics, Making, Software Development, and Amateur Radio from a Midwest Nerd