Moving from Ghost to HUGO

I started to blog 11 years ago. The first blog system i used, was Dotclear, I moved to Wordpress few years after because of the large plugin and theme ressources available. Wordpress is a really good blog platform, but it updates itslef too often for me.

Few months ago, the blog moved to Ghost, a really minimalist blog system, based on nodejs. A KISS aproach to the blog, I falled in love. The only issue i had with Ghost was about the hosting dependencies, no hard to manage, but since i don’t master nodeJs, i spent too much hours to hack into.

I discovered HUGO. Hugo is a static blog generator, written with a language (GOLANG), i use everyday.

So, i moved from GHOST to HUGO hosted on Google App engine.

Ghost migration to Hugo

Ghost and Hugo share the same markdown notation for posts content. The fist thing to do : extract posts from Ghost db (sqlite) to individual .md files and move them to HUGO/content/post/ folder.

The code I used to achieve this is here : GHOST_TO_HUGO.php

Next step, move GHOST/content directory to HUGO/static directory. This way all references like images keeps working.

Migration completed !

Theme

The default theme on ghost was perfect for my blog, but unavailable on HUGO… So i ported the casper theme from GHOST to HUGO, you can find it here : hugo-theme-casper

Publishing

Google App Engine

I added the GAE configuration file app.yaml into the HUGO/static directory, to see it pushed to the Public directory each time i generate the blog.

$ appcfg update public

This Blog is now Proudly published with HUGO, with a theme from Ghost (Casper) !