Hugo is one of the most popular static site generators. In the world of web development we usually choose npm as our dependency management solution. Hugo, however, is written in Go - and thus not integrated into the npm module ecosystem. Instead, users are asked to install Hugo globally on their systems. Suboptimal, really.

But don't you worry, Hugo Installer is here to help! It's a small Node.js script which you can use to fetch the correct Hugo binary for your system, e.g. via a postinstall hook within a package.json file. Neat!

Features include:

• 💻 Compatible with all operating systems and system architectures (Windows, MacOS, Linux, ..., CI/CD)
• ⭐ Supports all Hugo versions, including extended version
• ❤️ Verifies checksum & runs health check when installing
• 👀 Recognizes already downloaded binaries

You can get the hugo-installer via npm by adding it as a new devDependency to your package.json file and running npm install. Alternatively, run the following command:

npm install hugo-installer --save-dev

• hugo-installer requires NodeJS 14 (or higher) to be installed

We recommended to use hugo-installer as part of your postinstall hook within your project's package.json file.

The Hugo version can be set using the --version CLI parameter. For example:

{
  "scripts": {
    "postinstall": "hugo-installer --version 0.103.0"
  }
}

Important: Make sure to use the exact version number as used in the official Hugo GitHub releases (e.g. trailing zeros that exist or do not exist)

You can also use the extended version of Hugo (for some operating systems!) by specifying the --extended CLI parameter. For example:

{
  "scripts": {
    "postinstall": "hugo-installer --version 0.103.0 --extended"
  }
}

Bonus tip: The --version CLI parameter can also be an object path to some value defined in your package.json file. This allows for the Hugo version to be configured someplace else, e.g. in a otherDependencies object. For example:

{
  "otherDependencies": {
    "hugo": "0.103.0"
  },
  "scripts": {
    "postinstall": "hugo-installer --version otherDependencies.hugo"
  }
}

The following lists all available CLI parameters and their respective default values. Only the --version CLI parameter is required.

You can always take a look at all available CLI parameters using the --help CLI parameter. For example:

hugo-installer --help

The following lists all environment variables that can be used, all of them being optional.

Once fetched, the hugo binary can be used directly from your favourite command line, as part of an npm script, from within an Node.js script or in any way you desire.

Using Hugo from within an npm script is not as simple as it seems if you care about OS compatibility (which you should). On Windows systems in particular, it is not possible to execute binary files directly from within an npm script. I developed a tiny npm module named exec-bin which allows you to do exactly that simply by prepending its command.

Add exec-bin to your devDependencies, hit npm install and run Hugo from within your npm script by prepending the exec-bin command. For instance:

exec-bin bin/hugo/hugo --config=hugo.config.json

If you only care about Linux-based systems, you can run the executable as expected without any additional tooling. For instance:

bin/hugo/hugo --config=hugo.config.json

One might also want to integrate Hugo in a NodeJS build script, or a NodeJS-based build tool such as Gulp. You can execute the Hugo binary using the Node.JS spawn function. For example:

const path = require('path');
const spawn = require('child_process').spawn;

// Use Hugo
spawn(path.resolve(process.cwd(), 'bin', 'hugo', 'hugo'), [`--config=hugo.config.json`], {
  stdio: 'inherit',
}).on('close', () => {
  // Callback
});