If you are an aspiring tech blogger looking to launch your site quickly, look no more. This post is about how I spun up a blog in under 15 minutes using Hexo (I was not paid to write this).
I’ll share my personal experience and provide a step-by-step process to help you succeed where I’ve failed before.
Why Hexo?
Hexo is like many of the existing static site generators out there, but with one awesome caveat: there’s a lot of batteries included. These are some of the reasons I chose to use Hexo:
- It has crazy awesome documentation with plenty of examples
- It is more lightweight and faster than using Wordpress
- It supports markdown out of the box
- Setup can be done in under 5 minutes
- It is secure by default (static sites tend to be)
- It is highly customizable with themes
- It is free and open source
- There is a built in server for local testing
- There is no database required
- Support for multiple languages is possible through i18n
- Configuration is located in one place (a _config.yml file that is easy to read and parse)
1 | def give_reader_words_of_encouragement() -> None: |
If you’re convinced or willing to give it a try, let’s go through setup together.
Setup
Setup takes about 10-15 minutes.
Prerequisites
Installing Hexo
- install Hexo:
npm install hexo-cli -g - setup the initial blog:
hexo init blog - install dependencies
cd blog && npm install - start the server:
hexo server
Congratulations. You have a working blog already.
Spend the next 5 minutes becoming familiar with how to create blog pages and blog posts:
Documentation concerning blog creation is here (5 minute read): https://hexo.io/docs/writing.html
Create a new page
1 | $ hexo new page about |
Create a new post
1 | $ hexo new "My New Post" |
More info: Writing
Create a new draft
1 | $ hexo new draft "My New Post" |
Publish draft
1 | $ hexo publish draft "My New Post" |
Under the hood, this just moves the markdown file from source/_drafts to source/_posts
Run server
1 | $ hexo server |
More info: Server
Generate static files
1 | $ hexo generate |
More info: Generating
Deploy to remote sites
1 | $ hexo deploy |
More info: Deployment
Documentation
Documentation can be found here