PeterSmith.org | Automating Hugo

Automating Hugo

I've been kind of unhappy with my current way of creating post. It has gotten rather messy, and so I spent some time making things a bit easier — at least in terms of creating posts.

This isn't the first time I've looked at this issue. From awhile ago, see [https://petersmith.org/blog/2021/06/07/automating-hugo/][this post]] and [https://petersmith.org/blog/2016/11/21/automating-hugo-part2/][that post].

First off, I have a function to create the title of the post.


(defun ps/create-hugo-post-file (&optional post-type)
  "Create a blog org-file in ps/data + path-to-blog"
      (interactive)
      (unless post-type (setq post-type "blog"))
      (setq ps/post-title (read-from-minibuffer "Title: "))
      (let* ((filename (concat (read-from-minibuffer "Filename: "
                       (replace-regexp-in-string "-\\.org" ".org"
                                                 (concat (format-time-string "%Y%m%d-")
                                                         (downcase
                                                          (replace-regexp-in-string "[^a-z0-9]+" "-" ps/post-title))
                                                         ".org"))))))

        (expand-file-name filename (concat ps/hugo-post-dir post-type "/"))))

Not knowing much elisp, it's probably a bit clunky. But it does work.

Then I added these lines into my org-capture-templates definitions.


("h" "Hugo Templates")
("hb" "Blog post" plain (file (lambda() (ps/create-hugo-post-file "blog")))
   (file ,(concat ps-org-files "Org/tpl-hugo-post.txt")))
("hj" "Journal post" plain (file (lambda() (ps/create-hugo-post-file "journal")))
   (file ,(concat ps-org-files "Org/tpl-hugo-post.txt")))

It took some faffing around, and I couldn't quite make the ps/create-hugo-post-file work right. I kept getting an error, saying org-capture-expand-file: Invalid file location: nil. Grrr. But the lambda() trick seems to have sorted that. I don't understand why … I've more reading to do on that.

Finally, as my template string was getting big, I created a file tpl-hugo-post.txt to make managing it easier. it looks like this (and includes some dummy text):


#+title: %(format "%s" ps/post-title)
#+date:  "%t"
#+draft: false
#+categories[]: %^{Categories|technology|it|research|the-arts|blogging|jottings|productivity|learning|teaching}

%?* They're all dead dave

%x

All, in all that works well. Now to get the uploading to Netlify etc working well.