What it lacks in extensibility, it makes up for in a plethora of built-in features, and speed unmatched by any other static site generator. I did a basic test in Hugo, it does it in about 500ms. Most themes already come with a Gemfile, making this step relatively painless. Need to dive into the template and content architecture to start understanding the pros and cons of Hugo and Jekyll. Hugo does not currently have a plugin API at all, so adding that kind of functionality is a bit tougher. Because of this plugin architecture, it's relatively easy to add functionality to your Jekyll-generated site with reasonably short snippets of code available through the Jekyll community or that you write yourself. In Jekyll, all of your content is stored in text files instead of a database. Outside of the community of designers and developers for the web, most folks don't already have that setup. Could be obvious from the name, but wasn't to me. Now it’s time to make a choice! Jekyll’s themes are built using Shopify’s Liquid templating engine. Choosing the right tools to build a website isn’t easy these days. Liquid is a safe templating engine which is made to run untrusted code on their servers. TL;DR: Jekyll is a flexible and beginner-friendly static site generator. Including Computers Electronics & Technology, Arts & Entertainment, Science & Education, Games and 20 other categories. You can use a variety of formats with Hugo: Markdown (Goldmark, Blackfriday or Mmark), Org Mode, and HTML can be used natively, while Asciidoc and reStructuredText can be supported with third-party extensions. Jekyll uses a _config.yml file and Hugo uses config.toml (although you can use YAML or even JSON syntax with Hugo's config if you're more comfortable with either of those). Since Hugo is built using Go — a compiled language — installing or updating Hugo is as simple as downloading a binary and setting up your system to use it. Unlike Jekyll, Hugo is written in Go, a statically compiled language. Good overview, but I disagree that static site generators solve the problem of WordPress and "good old HTML and CSS" being too complicated for people who don't know "all the idiosyncrasies of low-level web design.". Hugo does not currently have a plugin API at all, so adding that kind of functionality is a bit tougher. It's pretty much the main way I write almost everything these days. 545 issues. It's very easy to work in and human-readable. I have been doing extended research on this topic and in the end chose to use Jekyll. Jason van Gumster mostly makes stuff up. Language: Go Templates: Go License: Apache-2.0. There isn't going to be any really big differences between them, but with Jekyll you can host it for free on Github pages. Second, Jekyll relying on a Ruby environment is a hassle. You can even set up templates called archetypes that hold customized front matter for pages of different types (like if you have both a blog and a podcast on your website). Jekyll by itself is fairly barebones and doesn’t do a lot of the things you expect a modern website to do, such as: However, this can all be supplemented by using third-party Jekyll plugins, which come in five flavors: For example, we’ve built a menu plugin for Jekyll that allows you to manage menus inside the Forestry CMS. Get started with Forestry.io. And I have a lot of Loops, Taxonomies and Tags. Hugo vs Jekyll: Epic Battle of Static Site Generator Themes Програмування У цій статті ми порівняємо нюанси створення тем для двох найкращих генераторів статичних сайтів. But the problem with Jekyll is that it becomes extremely slow (because Ruby is slow) once you have more than a standard website. Here’s a summary of some of Hugo’s best features: Hugo is blazingly fast. Red Hat and the Red Hat logo are trademarks of Red Hat, Inc., registered in the United States and other countries. They both have great documentation and quick-start guides. Installation for both Jekyll and Hugo is pretty simple. Get started on Forestry.io. Webstoemp was previously running on Jekyll, which I liked because of its ease of use and flexibility. The downside to that option has been that you've been relegated to coding the whole thing by hand yourself. Hugo is fast! Hopefully by the end of this article, you'll have a better idea. Explore Hugo and the Forestry CMS with one or our Hugo Starters. And, well, at least in the case of one SSG you could use freaking libreoffice to create the pages if markdown doesn't tickle your fancy :-). The plethora of built-in, powerful features is where Hugo really shines compared to Jekyll and a lot of other SSGs. The really nice thing is that whether you're running jekyll serve or hugo serve, both are configured by default to watch for any changes you make to your site as you work on it. So imagine you had a content team that made on average 100 edits to your site, blog, or docs per week…. Hugo was the clear winner. Similar to Jekyll, all of your content is stored in text files in your project. In fact, Hugo user @darinpope managed to get Hugo to generate 600k pages in under 5 minutes! This means that it’s built to do mostly everything you need without running custom code. This isn’t the most painful experience, but it isn’t as simple as downloading an app. The only missing thing in Hugo is the incremental build. Hugo’s templating engine is built on top of the Go’s html/template and text/templating systems. Once installed, though, both Hugo and Jekyll are pretty evenly matched. Developing with Hugo feels better than Jekyll due to its fast builds and built-in live reload server. For example generating Sitemaps tended to be faster when doing it in Node instead of Jekyll. Due to the need of adding YAML front matter to each file, a lot of larger production Jekyll sites opt to forgo the built-in asset pipeline for a modern build tool like Gulp or Webpack. Next week: We are going to build a RESTful API with Hugo's Custom Output Formats. Written in Ruby by Tom Preston-Werner, GitHub's co-founder, it is distributed under the open source MIT license. That's kind of annoying when you're iterating over small changes. It's where the people are, after all. Edit this page on Github! Front matter fields can be added to these files, allowing you to define data that can then be used inside your templates. Since the HTML files aren’t generated dynamically, we say that Hugo is a static site generator. Jekyll page templates are built with the Liquid templating language. Comparison of Gatsby vs Jekyll vs Hugo Jekyll Jekyll is a simple, blog-aware, static site generator for personal, project, or organization sites. You get the speed and security of static HTML pages, but with a workflow that's closer to the convenience of a dynamic site. Now that we’ve covered the core functionality of Jekyll, let’s take a step back and take a bird’s eye view of this static site generator by looking at the pros and cons. A static site generator lets you generate a static website using data and templates. Theme management is also an interesting topic. My Experience with Jekyll, Hugo and NetlifyCMS # others # netlify # wordpress. The opinions expressed on this website are those of each author, not of the author's employer or of Red Hat. You clone (or create) themes into their own space in a themes subdirectory. Opensource.com aspires to publish all content under a Creative Commons license but may not be able to do so in all cases. This affects in many ways the set of Hugo's features particularly plugins. You write the content for your site in both systems using Markdown syntax. In both cases, nearly every theme is a Git repository (often hosted on GitHub) that you clone into your website scaffolding. We previously released a post on the performance of Hugo and Jekyll and compared the two. It's for the step after that, the actual making of that site. You can review the files locally before copying them to the computer hosting the HTTP server. This is similar to Liquid in that it allows limited logic in your templates. Get the highlights in your inbox every week. Hugo takes caching a step further and all HTML files are rendered on your computer. It's a one-click install on most hosting providers, and there's a gigantic market of plugins and themes available to choose from, depending on the type of site you're trying to build. Jekyll was released in 2009. Jekyll is uh oh it has plugins! I've found that I'm partial to the way that Hugo handles themes. Themes can easily be installed either by downloading and adding them to your Jekyll project or by installing them as a plugin using RubyGems. I'd suggest just using Jekyll. With 30% of the internet using Wordpress, it’s great to know migrating to the modern stack is easy. I have done a huge project: https://docs.mendix.com, where we have made the complete website Open Source on Github. Getting Started Guide However, it does mean you have to extend Liquid with custom helpers using Jekyll plugins if you need extra functionality. Control. Hugo Hugo is a static site generator written in Go. As with the configuration file, Jekyll uses YAML syntax for front matter, while Hugo will accept TOML, YAML, or JSON (default is TOML). Hugo uses Markdown format with YAML Front Matter. The value Jekyll offers is that it allows you to take the static HTML from any existing website and quickly turn it into a working static site with its simple templating library. There sure are plenty to choose from... and not just "conventional" social media sites. While Hugo is only a few years old, a variety of themes are already available for the quickly growing SSG. I think the use case for Jekyll or Hugo is a site where you want the dynamically-driven features of a blog (date-sorted posts, automated snippets and indexes, categories, tags) without the installation and security issues of a dynamic backend. I don't even know what this feature is called to begin searching for it. StackShare. Jekyll’s templating is … We're evaluating both static site generators based on how quickly you can get started, availability of themes, editing workflow, and extensibility. This means you can customize a theme to your tastes without messing too much with the source of the original theme, allowing it to stay generic enough for other people to use. Just learning HTML alone is useless for me as anything exciting I see in a website is always more involved, like using javascript, and many *.js tools out there. Hugo can generate a site with 1000 pages in only 0.1 seconds, whereas Jekyll takes several minutes for the same site 2. Started in 2008, Jekyll is touted as “a simple, blog-aware, static site generator.”. In either case, once you do that, you have a completed static website that you can upload and have hosted nearly anywhere. The most important reason people chose Jekyll is: Hugo Hugo, being constructed based on Golang, makes the whole static site generator a fast alternative. Hugo’s templates also use braces, but they’re built with Go Templates. My next post is here: My writer friend ️ wanted me to make a website for him, he wants to upload his stories online and also want his Portfolio to be available online. Jekyll is written in Ruby, and while its plugin system makes it very extensible, it can’t keep up with generators like Hugo. We are going to build a RESTful API with Hugo's Custom Output Formats. We looked at Webpack and how it can make you write better JavaScript. The workflows for building your site in Jekyll and Hugo are pretty similar once you have your initial configuration set up. So honestly you really can not beat the speed of a static site. In Jekyll, that would be jekyll build. Just point to the theme from your config.toml, and you're good to go. Jekyll has a decent default theme, though it's pretty bare bones. Subscribe to our newsletter to get the posts directly in your inbox. 18 September 2019 Static Site Generators are not for me! Both generators are leaders in the space, and there are great examples of both being used in the wild for big projects, like healthcare.gov, using Jekyll, and the new Smashing Magazine built using Hugo. 3 forks. VuePress - A static-site generator built by the Vue.js team. Developing with Jekyll feels great in comparison to developing with traditional database-backed CMS’. Not only does it make it relatively easy to switch between themes when you're first starting out, but it also gives you the ability to override any component file of a theme with your own file. If you already have a RubyGems environment set up and you need the extensibility of plugins, then Jekyll is the way to go. Wordpress no matter what has to query a database for every request and that adds up. And actually, you should use those sites. The syntax is similar, but different: {{ .Title }}. Hugo is implemented in Go. Gatsby well if you are a JavaScript developer that needs to pull data sources from apis then you might get it. A static website is pre-rendered: all the files (HTML, CSS, Javascript and images) exist as is, and do not need to be processed on the server level. (By the way, Paolo Bonzini has a great article on getting started with Jekyll.) 2 Hugo hasn't got a lead over Jekyll in any websites category. Templating in Hugo and Jekyll is a reasonably similar affair. In Jekyll, there's an additional step of using RubyGems' bundle to ensure that the theme is managed with the site. Please take a look at Nikola https://getnikola.com/. Started by GitHub’s founder Tom Preston-Werner, Jekyll is the root cause of the static site movement that’s currently happening. I have seen tests with Hugo where people generated more than 100,000 Posts and the render time was still minutes. When you look at the locally served version of your site in a browser, it automatically updates with any change you make, regardless of whether that change is to content, configuration, theme, or just an image. Hugo can create thousands of web pages in a few seconds. My previous post was a banger, I didn't know about the DEV's Power. That's the value of having your own place on the web. Unless your spirit animal is Emily Dickinson, when you make a thing, you want to share it with the world. Jekyll is written in Ruby and used worldwide. Benefits of Hugo over Jekyll ︎. © 2015-2021 Forestry.io. To put this into context, in our tests Hugo generated sites an average 35x faster than Jekyll, generating most sites in under a second. Hugo comes with an asset pipeline that will compile your Sass file. I have one with only 80 Posts and with tags and categories it gets even worse. Hugo has in-depth documentation on how to do this. With places like Artstation, Flickr, Soundcloud, and Wattpad, there's an outlet for you, whatever your medium. I will say that in terms of getting you started with your very first statically generated site, Jekyll has a slight advantage over Hugo because it starts with some basic content and a default theme. In Hugo’s case, all content intended to be generated is stored inside the content folder in your project. However, in terms of extensibility, Jekyll currently leads in a big way because of its plugin API. Because of the single install package, Hugo edges ahead here slightly. That new page file needs to be placed in the correct directory within your site's scaffolding. In either case, the place to go for themes—themes.gohugo.io for Hugo and jekyllthemes.org for Jekyll—is basically a single large page full of theme screenshots. Hugo - A Fast and Flexible Static Site Generator written in Go. Simply not possible for me. I am not a web developer, and I get by by quickly finding documentation on what I need. Read on to learn more about the differences between these two tools. Hugo has a clear advantage over other SSGs: it’s blazing fast. Hugo also supports TOML, YAML, and JSON for front matter where Jekyll only supports YAML. For simple websites, the process of converting to Hugo should be relatively simple and straightforward. It really comes down to determining how you're most comfortable working and what your site needs. For Jekyll, run jekyll serve, and for Hugo, hugo serve. Plus Hugo is written in Go and I have been recently learning Go so I was sold! All rights reserved. However, none of those places is truly yours. Of course, everyone's needs are a little bit different. (Note: If you have trouble using this plugin, you can export your site for Jekyll and use Hugo’s built in Jekyll converter listed above.) Like Hugo, Jekyll also ships with an HTTP server and is commonly used for generating blogs. It can also preprocess and postprocess your CSS to optimize it for production. As you make changes to files in your project, it will rebuild your project and reload the browser for you. A Fast and Flexible Static Site Generator. This sets up a general directory structure and scaffolding for your site. It’s one of the most popular SSG (static site generator) in the space right now with over 41k stars on GitHub, largely due to its simplicity and its tight integration with GitHub pages. wordpress-to-hugo-exporter - A one-click WordPress plugin that converts all posts, pages, taxonomies, metadata, and settings to Markdown and YAML which can be dropped into Hugo. Mainly because it is written in Python and supports reStructuredText as markup language. Jekyll is the oldest static site generator on this list. Hope we have this enhancement soon. You'll probably want to go theme hunting with your Jekyll site, too. Enter static site generators. In Hugo, it's just hugo. Jekyll built in a bracket of 1.4-6 seconds for the majority of the tests. As I mentioned, Hugo doesn't ship with a default theme at all, so that's probably one of the first things you're going to want to set up. If you don't keep all of those pieces up to date, they can pose a significant security risk and your site could get hijacked. Started in 2013, Hugo has quickly grown to become one of the most popular SSG with over 46k stars on GitHub. This report shows the usage statistics of Hugo vs. Jekyll as content management system on the web. When it comes to building static sites, the two leading solutions right now are Hugo and Jekyll. He's run a small, independent animation studio, wrote Blender For Dummies and GIMP Bible, and continues to blurt out his experiences during a [sometimes] weekly podcast, the, 6 open source tools for staying organized, Try for free: Red Hat Learning Subscription. 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