So I decided to simplify my workflow by using Hugo’s archetypes ¹. Archetypes allow us to create templates markdown files, which is then used to create our blog posts.

Archetypes

First, let’s create a new archetype we will call post-bundle

Create a new folder at the root of your project called archetypes (i.e. mkdir archetypes). Then inside the archetype folder, create a structure that looks like this.

├── post-bundle
│   ├── images
│   └── index.md

Page Bundles

We will be using a page bundle, so we keep all the content related to our post in a single folder, like the images ². All we need to do is create an index.md which will contain the content we show on our Hugo site.

index.md

Our index.md file will look something like this:

---
title: {{ slicestr (replace .Name "-" " ") 11 | title }}
date: {{ dateFormat "2006-01-02" .Date }}
canonicalURL: https://haseebmajid.dev/posts/{{.Name}}
tags: []
---

Let’s break this file down:

title: {{ slicestr (replace .Name "-" " ") 11 | title }}

Here we are using go tempting to take a variable .Name. For example if .Name = 2023-03-20--how-to-create-new-posts-on-hugo-using-archetypes- title: How to Create New Posts on Hugo Using Archetypes

You can see we strip the first 11 characters to strip the date of the title. Then we move all - hyphens and replace them with blank spaces. Finally, we convert it to a “title” case which will capitalize certain words such as Hugo and New but not on.

Next, we have:

date: {{ dateFormat "2006-01-02" .Date }}

This is just formatting the date to the format we want, in my case I want the date to be YYYY-MM-DD ³.

Post

Now that we have a template, let’s look at how we can create a new post. We will use a script to create new posts. Let’s create a new script at script/add:

#!/usr/bin/env bash

TITLE=${1:-}

TITLE_SLUG="$(echo -n "$TITLE" | sed -e 's/[^[:alnum:]]/-/g' | tr -s '-' | tr A-Z a-z)"
DATE="$(date +"%F")"
SLUG="$DATE-$TITLE_SLUG"

git checkout -b "$SLUG"
hugo new --kind post-bundle posts/$SLUG

This script takes a title as input and then converts it into a string we can use as the folder name and this will be the .Name variable. For example scripts/add "How to Create New Posts on Hugo using Archetypes" will become 2023-03-18--how-to-create-new-posts-on-hugo-using-archetypes-.

The script assumes you have a folder called content/posts where all of your posts are stored. I have all of my blog posts in content/posts, and then I have another folder for my talks at content/talks.

In my case, I use go-task ⁴ which can be used as a Makefile alternative. I have the following entry in my Taskfile.yml which looks like:

  new_post:
    cmds:
      - scripts/add "{{.CLI_ARGS}}"

Finally, I can do something like this; task new_post -- "How to Create New Posts on Hugo using Archetypes". This creates a new bundle at content/posts/2023-03-18--how-to-create-new-posts-on-hugo-using-archetypes-. With a new index.md, which looks like:

---
title: How to Create New Posts on Hugo Using Archetypes 
date: 2023-03-18
canonicalURL: https://haseebmajid.dev/posts/2023-03-18--how-to-create-new-posts-on-hugo-using-archetypes-
tags: []
---

Appendix

• Inspired by this post