Ox Hugo for the Orgconfig

Putting a couple how-to details down for easy searching later

What?

I’m combining all my orgconfig files into one, and then using ox-hugo to generate Markdown files for my Hugo site.

Why?

Hugo renders Org files just fine, but I wanted my config to be a bit more tightly integrated. ox-hugo works well as both plain old Org and as an intermediary that exports Hugo content. A single Org file can become as many Hugo pages as I want.

Getting it to work

This week my favorite Emacs flavor is Doom Emacs. Their org module supports ox-hugo as an option, so enabling that option in my init should do the trick — after a doom sync of course.

(doom!
 ⋮
 :lang
 (org +hugo))

Off in the depths of my ~/org/ folder, I create a new config.org.

#+title: My Orgconfig
#+hugo_base_dir: ~/Sites/random-geekery-blog/
#+hugo_section: config

Everything here will end up going in the config section of my site, under ~/Sites/random-geekery-blog/content/config.

Note

A while back I got stuck with ox-hugo for my site because of how big each section is. Using an Org file per section might work really well! It works great for this case, that’s for sure.

Each top-level section will be a page in /config/. I show which page in the subtree’s :properties:.

+ Emacs config
:properties:
:export_description: Be kinda weird if I didn't manage that one in Org, yes?
:export_file_name: emacs
:export_hugo_weight: 5
:end:

ox-hugo automatically converts the export properties to Hugo front matter. :export_file_name: of emacs maps out to a generated file emacs/index.md under content/config/.

Warning

If you’re playing along, remember to tag sensitive config sections as :noexport:!

Since I’m showing off Babel’s ability to tangle, I want to show the tangle references. :noweb no-export tells Babel to tangle when evaluating the block, but not when exporting.

#+name: zsh/base-variables
#+begin_src text :noweb no-export
<<zsh/set-base-path>>
<<zsh/define-editor>>
<<zsh/clicolor>>
<<zsh/add-home-bin>>
#+end_src

And — yeah. I still haven’t figured out a nice way to highlight those tangle bits, so for the moment I default to calling my mostly-tangled blocks “text”.

I also create a subtree for the section _index.md.

+ My personal orgconfig
:properties:
:export_file_name: _index
:end:

#+begin_note
This is my live config, written as an [[https://orgmode.org/][Org]] file and integrated with my site with [[https://ox-hugo.scripter.co/][=ox-hugo=]].
⋮

Now my config section summary is part of the config org file. I find this aesthetically pleasing.

The rest is implementation details

This whole process is fiddly. Org mode. Literate config. Hugo. ox-hugo. That makes the whole thing fiddly^4 or something. But these quick notes covered things that got in my way while gluing the whole thing together. If you want to try it out, at least some of the fiddliness should be clearer.