19th June 2017, 1 min read

Contributing to Hugo Static

The discussion forum for Hugo contains a description: Hugo development - how to contribute code. Also see Contributing to Hugo.

1. Preparation

First set GOPATH as

export GOPATH=$HOME/tmp/H

then

cd $GOPATH

Fetch source with go get

time go get -u -v github.com/spf13/hugo

takes around 1-2 minutes as it has to download almost 200MB.

Now change to the Hugo source code and compile

cd src/github.com/spf13/hugo/
time make hugo

Compilation from scratch takes roughly 1-2 minutes. Recompiling a single file usually takes less than 10 seconds.

In the same directory, run test-cases with

time make check

which takes less than a minute.

All timings are on an AMD FX(tm)-8120 Eight-Core Processor clocked with 3.1 GHz running Linux 4.11.3, and using Go 1.8.3.

2. Fork in Github, git branch and pull-request

Fork https://github.com/spf13/hugo by pressing the "Fork" icon:

Move original Git repository out of your way, clone the new fork, add or modify files as required, add, and commit them:

cd $GOPATH/src/github.com/spf13/
mv hugo hugo.original
time git clone git@github.com:eklausme/hugo.git

cd hugo
git branch YOURNAME
git checkout YOURNAME

go fmt
git add YOURFILE
git commit

A git clone of hugo alone takes less than 10 seconds. Watch out to run go fmt before git add.

Contributors are asked to provide single commits. In case you have multiple, then squash them into one, i.e., git rebase -i and git push -f.

Finally press the pull-request button in Github:

Be prepared to wait weeks or even months before your pull-request will be accepted or even rejected, so patience is required. In our case the proposed pull-request was ignored/rejected. So I consider the Hugo developers to be rather unwelcoming.