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Hugo

A fast static site generator written in Go.

Hugo builds static websites from Markdown content, Go-template layouts, and a TOML or YAML configuration. Sites with thousands of pages typically build in seconds — Hugo is among the fastest static site generators available. The themes ecosystem is large, and the built-in shortcodes system lets content authors embed common patterns (image galleries, video embeds, callouts) without writing HTML.

Steve Francia started Hugo in 2013 while at Docker; Bjørn Erik Pedersen has been the lead maintainer for many years now. The codebase is in Go, distribution is a single static binary, and the Hugo modules system makes it possible to compose sites from reusable theme and component packages.

Hugo is widely used for documentation sites (Kubernetes's docs site is Hugo, as are many CNCF project documentation sites), personal blogs, and static marketing pages. For larger or more JavaScript-heavy sites, frameworks like Next.js and Astro have captured more attention, but for static-first content Hugo remains a default choice.

Debian/Ubuntu: sudo apt install hugo
Fedora/RHEL:   sudo dnf install hugo
Arch:          sudo pacman -S hugo
macOS:         brew install hugo