migrating to hugo from hexo

i haven’t written in a long time. it’s not that i have nothing to write about (i actually have a set of post ideas written somewhere), but more of just not having the time for writing.

just yesterday, after seeing a fellow developer’s new blog based on jekyll, i decided to search for a nicer theme for this blog. in the process, i came across hugo, a blogging engine written using go. the two things that interested me the most about it was the fact that it was supposed to be super fast (whereas regenerating files for hexo still took a bit of time), that it was written in go (which i hope to learn one day), and that i found a theme i liked for it. the fact that chrome on the latest el capitan beta doesn’t load my site at all was yet another reason to push me to go for it.

the process didn’t end up being too bad, and i’ll document some interesting tidbits i found here in case someone else goes through the migration in the future.

fixing the metadata.

there are a few important pieces required to fix the metadata - first, ensuring all lines start with ---. for me, any files i generated on hexo didn’t have --- on the top of them. secondly, fixing the dates. hexo dates were in a different format than the iso8601 format dates. furthermore, some of the entries i had wrapped their dates with single quotes.

i found something here to do this, and modified it to fix the single quote issue as well:

# ensure dates don't start with single quotes
for file in *; do awk '{
if ($1 == "date:") {
  gsub("\047", "", $0); print;
} else {
  print $0;
}
}' "$file" > temp.md && mv temp.md $file ; done

# fix the dates and add the three dashes as the first line
for file in *; do awk '{
  if (NR == 1) { print "---"; }
  if ($1 == "date:") {
    printf("%s %sT%s-05:00\n", $1, $2, $3);
  } else {
    print $0;
  }
}' "$file" > temp.md && mv temp.md $file ; done

# wrap dates with quotes that aren't wrapped in quotes
for file in *; do awk '{
  if ($1 == "date:") {
    if ($2 ~ /^"/) {
      print $0;
    } else {
      printf("%s \"%s\"\n", $1, $2);
    }
  } else { print $0; }
}' "$file" > temp.md && mv temp.md $file; done

one last thing was that some of the entries i had were missing the seconds field, and hugo complained about being unable to parse their times. since they were only a handfull of entries, i went ahead and fixed them manually.

fixing code highlighting

i used something like this to convert the codeblock style to the pygments driven code highlighting:

for file in *.md; do awk '{
if ($2 == "codeblock") { gsub("lang:", "", $(NF-1));
  printf("%s< highlight %s >}}\n", "{{", $(NF-1));
} else if ($2 == "endcodeblock") {
  printf("%s< /highlight >}}\n", "{{");
} else { print $0; }
}' "$file" > temp.md && mv temp.md $file ; done

as a recommendation, if trying to use the hyde theme, set pygmentsUseClasses to true in the configuration file.

after doing this, i realized that i wanted to use hyde-x, which by default uses highlight.js. i made this work (after running the above) by running:

find . -exec sed -i '.bak' 's/{{< highlight \(.*\) >}}/```\1/' {} \;
find . -exec sed -i '.bak' 's/{{< \/highlight >}}/```/' {} \;

fixing images

hugo supports shortcodes as a means for extending markdown. using a combination of the migrate to hugo from jekyll article, the shortcodes documentation, and migrating to hugo from octopress, i came up with a similar approach for fixing images that had a width and height in them.

find . -exec sed -i '.bak' 's/{% img \([^ ]*\) \([^ ]*\) \([^ ]*\) %}/{{< img src="\1" width="\2" height="\3" >}}/' {} \;

this was combined with adding an img shortcode, which looked like this:

<img src="{{ .Get "src" }}"
{{ if .Get "width" }} width="{{.Get "width" }}" {{ end }}
{{ if .Get "height" }} height="{{.Get "height" }}" {{ end }} >

in addition, i modified the css to remove display:block from poole.css under images to allow having two images side by side.

one other minor thing i found was that layout: post, which was either an artifact of hexo or octopress, was breaking disqus rendering. i fixed this by doing this:

for file in *.md; do
   grep -v "layout: post" $file > temp.md
   mv temp.md $file
done

a little bit of extra tweaking to the settings and layouts and i was good to go! hopefully, this will push me to write posts a little bit more frequently :)