Why on Earth would you ever do something like this? Well, because Hugo is a fantastic static site generator that supports Asciidoc format content files with an external helper, and Asciidoc is an excellent plain text documentation format for content that requires a bit more power than Markdown alone can provide. This post goes over what I setup to make this happen. Overview Of course you can roll your own to get the job done, but here is what I used in my solution.
For one of my projects I have a few different site developers and content authors. I really wanted to simplify the process of adding a new member to the team and get them up to speed quickly. Fortunately, the Static Site Generator “Hugo” uses compiled binaries and does not require anything setup on the system to run. Having said that, setting up a couple of external tools (NPM and Python) can make running and updating Hugo on any OS a breeze for anyone on the team.
Backstory I posted recently about building online fundraising pages for a Color Run event hosted by my daughter’s Elementary School PTA. Originally I was using a CSV file as the data source for the student’s donation pages. I found a way to keep the data in Google Sheets and pull from it directly on site build in Netlify, so that they can easily be updated by admin staff in the PTA without going to text files or messing with the Git repository for each change.
