Introduction

In this post, we will install the blogdown package in R, then Hugo, and then a Hugo theme. Note that you should have an updated installation of R on your machine, and preferably an IDE¹ to work from. We prefer RStudio, but any will work (e.g., PyCharm, etc.).

Installing blogdown and Hugo

In order to install and use blogdown, we run the following to install the package and then load the library as we would for any other R package.

install.packages("blogdown", 
                 repos = "https://cloud.r-project.org/")

library(blogdown)

Next, to install Hugo, run install_hugo() from blogdown.

install_hugo(force = TRUE)

Installing Themes

Hugo has tons of pre-configured themes. You should select a theme that supports blogging, as there are a variety of themes that serve various functions. But you should also select a theme that is well designed, with minimal distractions. Content and site organization should be very clear to any visitor, and the more streamlined the design, the easier it will be to interact with your site.

There are many Hugo themes out there, some which are are not included in that set of themes linked above. So, if you don’t find a theme you like from the link above, simply Google something like “minimalist Hugo themes” or “clean Hugo themes” to start exploring.

Our site uses minimal. To install minimal, run install_theme() from blogdown, and be sure to put the developer (Github username) and theme in quotes.²

install_theme(theme = "calintat/minimal", 
              force = TRUE)

That’s it! You’ve now installed Blogdown, Hugo and a theme on your computer. In the next post we will describe how to connect your site to Netlify.