Advice needed regarding Hugo Dev environment on Mac

alexandros · January 23, 2018, 2:00pm

I am in a very difficult situation at the moment. My internal SSD died suddenly and I lost my Ubuntu installation. And non backed up work. But nothing that I cannot redo.

I am seriously thinking about purchasing a Macbook Air 2017.

But I don’t have the time to research this properly in the Hugo Docs etc (as I have a very tight deadline and I need to redo a project I lost).

My questions are these:

What is the best way to install Hugo on a Mac? Is the package from Homebrew the latest? What is the updating process? Manual or automatic?

Also I need Git and the Lets Encrypt manual certbot. How do you set up these on the Mac?

(No need for a lengthy description if you could point me to a link that would be enough.)

Any answers will be very appreciated. Obviously I will not be around in the forum while I try to sort out this mess I’m in.

Leo_Merkel · January 23, 2018, 2:14pm

I develop with Hugo on an iMac and MacBook Pro (which is no difference to MacBook Air regarding macOS) under macOS High Sierra. No problems at all.

Just open Terminal on MacBook and install Hugo with brew install hugo. That’s the best way because when there are updates available, Homebrew takes care. The update today was on Homebrew just 1 or 2 hours after the announcement here.

You’ll set up Git the same way as above. I use Let’s Encrypt as well. They have very good documentation on their site with regards to setup.

That’s basically it.

BTW: If you’re considerung a MacBook 2017 model look at Apples refurbished Products: https://www.apple.com/shop/browse/home/specialdeals/mac/macbook

bep · January 23, 2018, 4:14pm

I have developed on a 13 inch MacBook Retina for the last 3 years or so. Before that I was Linux and in general took whatever the clients offered me (Windows, usually). This MacBook has the right balance, and I would probably pick this over the lighter air. Apple has been messing with the ports on it lately (removed the camera card slot etc.), and I’m happy I have two “old” 2015 variants.

joelfischerr · January 23, 2018, 4:15pm

just a heads up: homebrew does not do automatic updates, you’ll have to run brew update to download (not install) the newest updates. But updating with homebrew is rather easy: Radar – O’Reilly

But working with hugo is just fine on macOS.

alexandros · January 23, 2018, 4:45pm

I loved Gnome and lately it was very stable.

But the problem with Ubuntu is that system updates cause regressions more often than I liked and a hard shutdown with Alt + Sysreq + o was the only way out from a system freeze.

I have reason to believe that these shutdowns in the period of a year and a half caused electrical damage to my SSD, that added up until it failed me completely with no warning.

I wish I could afford a Macbook Pro but it’s out of the question. In Greece the 13’’ model with 256 GB costs around 2650 euros. So the Air is my only option. And I need something new and not a refurbished or an older model, because I am not willing to take that risk.

I will use the Macbook Air for Hugo and general frontend development only. The laptop I have now is already back to Windows 7 for my graphic design work.

But I really don’t want to install Windows 10 with the Linux subsystem. I had enough of Windows. And web development with that OS feels convoluted.

bep · January 23, 2018, 4:54pm

That is crazy …

I bought the 128 GB version … But last week I switched the SSD with a new Samsung NVMe 250 GB for about 130 euros (had to get an adapter from Singapore).

Really fast:

alexandros · January 23, 2018, 5:24pm

It is crazy. We have 24% VAT. And we cannot buy computers from abroad because we have capital controls… Anyway thank you for your replies.

joelfischerr · January 23, 2018, 5:26pm

Refurbished models generally have the same warranty as the new ones, if you’re buying them from Apple. And it’s possible to extend the warranty with Apple.

Leo_Merkel · January 23, 2018, 5:59pm

That’s true. But the beauty of macOS is that Automator is part of the OS. And I have a task which starts every morning to update the brew installs (brew update, brew upgrade, brew cleanup and brew doctor).

Leo_Merkel · January 23, 2018, 6:02pm

No risk at all. I only buy those. Example: I purchased a refurbished MacBook Pro 15" in mid 2010 with extended warranty which was around 2.000€ and sold it last year for 600€. Same with my iMac from 2011. Bought a refurbished one last year and sold the “old” one for good money.

jgreely · January 24, 2018, 1:43am

Seconded. Refurbs purchased directly from Apple go through a better QA process than their brand-new products.

-j

RickCogley · January 24, 2018, 2:52am

Unsolicited tips coming at you. Macs use the command defaults write or defaults read to write and read from the Terminal. When you set up your system, you might want to look into scripts like this, and cherry pick some settings:

github.com

mathiasbynens/dotfiles/blob/master/.macos

#!/usr/bin/env bash

# ~/.macos — https://mths.be/macos

# Close any open System Preferences panes, to prevent them from overriding
# settings we’re about to change
osascript -e 'tell application "System Preferences" to quit'

# Ask for the administrator password upfront
sudo -v

# Keep-alive: update existing `sudo` time stamp until `.macos` has finished
while true; do sudo -n true; sleep 60; kill -0 "$$" || exit; done 2>/dev/null &

###############################################################################
# General UI/UX                                                               #
###############################################################################

# Set computer name (as done via System Preferences → Sharing)
#sudo scutil --set ComputerName "0x6D746873"

This file has been truncated. show original

I use brew and brew cask for a lot of install work, the former for Terminal-only stuff and the latter for GUI. This is irrelevant now, but maybe relevant if you keep using a Mac. You can do brew bundle dump to make a so-called brewfile, which can be moved to a new Mac, after which you can then do brew bundle to reinstall stuff.

I update my brew with a zsh alias:

 alias brewhaha='echo "Updating brew various...";brew update && brew upgrade; brew cleanup; brew cask cleanup; brew doctor'

Brew lets you load the bleeding edge by using the —HEAD option. My zsh function for a couple apps I like to keep at their freshest:

brew_reinstall_head_apps (){
    brew reinstall --HEAD neovim
    brew reinstall --HEAD fzf
    brew reinstall --HEAD tmux
}

The Mac App Store is convenient for installing various things but, those apps have some kind of security limitations (some sort of sandboxing or APIs that they can’t use). Some devs have stopped selling via the App Store for that reason, so, there are apps out there with both an App Store version and a “direct” version. I go for the direct version when I can, since it means a little more money for the dev, and, there’s usually some feature that is nice to have, which wouldn’t be available in the App Store version due to the security constraints.

It’s irritating that I cannot do everything via brew, but, Apple insists on certain utils being installed by XCODE, so, I always install that, run the GUI version and accept its license, and then run:

xcode-select --install

That installs the command line utils from XCODE.

Some Apps I like:

Maintain’s Cocktail - regular maintenance and access to various settings.
Lingon X - for controlling launchd (macOS’s “init”)
iTerm2 v3 - Terminal replacement
Path Finder - Finder replacement
ImageOptim - free image optimization
Knox - creates secure encrypted disk images that you password protect. You can do this for free with diskutil though.
GPG Suite - gpgtools.org
FontExplorer X Pro - font organization, a Font Book replacement
Little Snitch - see (and/or block) what is connecting to you or, what you are connecting to
Bartender - control the icons on the icon bar
Typinator - automatically insert text snippets (e.g. type “lipsum” and get a Lorem Ipsum block)
Hazel - control your trash (installs in System Prefs as a panel)
Popclip - https://pilotmoon.com/popclip/ - sometimes useful but it can be invasive
Apps from Affinity - photoshop and illustrator replacements for a fixed price
Photo Mechanic - for ingesting and assigning photo metadata automatically (lately I’m avoiding using Photos, which scarily bundles everything into a fragile “library”)
App Cleaner - to really delete an app and all the various files it creates
SmartGit - a nice git GUI
apps from Rogue Ameba - for audio recording & editing
Screen Flow - screen cast creation (you can do this with the included QuickTime)
Carbon Copy Cloner - for making a hard disk block-level backup
Napkin - screen shot annotation (you can annotate a bit with the included Preview)

Lastly, check out the little apps in /Applications/Utilities and /System/Library/CoreServices/Applications, and, Automator, which is Apple’s venerable automation solution. There are a number of nice goodies that come with macOS.

There’s so much more so don’t hesitate to ask. If I know of something useful I’ll share it.

Edit:

also, Codebook from Zetetic https://www.zetetic.net/codebook/. It’s a password manager, that has a nice way to paste passwords into not only websites but also apps or the Terminal.

alexandros · January 24, 2018, 5:45am

Thanks for the advice @RickCogley Much appreciated!

adrinux · January 26, 2018, 3:49pm

Call me old fashioned but I just download the binary, stick it in ‘/usr/local/bin’, set the ownership and perms and rename it to ‘hugo’. Hugo doesn’t update that often. Also avoids hassle mid project when a feature is deprecated.

tl:dr you can make installation as complicated as you want

RickCogley · February 4, 2018, 12:16am

By the way @alexandros, I remembered when you use rsync on Mac, you need to specify --iconv like this:

github.com

RickCogley/dotfiles/blob/master/zsh/zshrc#L143


export STYLECSS_HASH="$(git log -1 --format='%h' /Users/rcogley/dev/eSolia/static/css/style.css)"
export FEEDEKCSS_HASH="$(git log -1 --format='%h' /Users/rcogley/dev/eSolia/static/css/FeedEk-2.0.min.css)"
export FONTELLOCSS_HASH="$(git log -1 --format='%h' /Users/rcogley/dev/eSolia/static/css/fontello.min.css)"
export GHPMATCSS_HASH="$(git log -1 --format='%h' /Users/rcogley/dev/eSolia/static/css/ghpages-materialize.min.css)"
export MATCSS_HASH="$(git log -1 --format='%h' /Users/rcogley/dev/eSolia/static/css/materialize.min.css)"
export PRISMCSS_HASH="$(git log -1 --format='%h' /Users/rcogley/dev/eSolia/static/css/prism.min.css)"
export TYPOCSS_HASH="$(git log -1 --format='%h' /Users/rcogley/dev/eSolia/static/css/typography.min.css)"
export LATESTSHA="$(git rev-parse master)"
chmod -R 775 /Users/rcogley/dev/eSolia/static/
hugo --config="/Users/rcogley/dev/eSolia/config_en.toml" -s /Users/rcogley/dev/eSolia/ -d /tmp/esolia.com
/usr/local/bin/rsync -avz --delete --iconv=UTF-8-MAC,UTF-8 --exclude '.well-known' /tmp/esolia.com/ rcogley@cogley.info:/home/rcogley/webapps/es_hugo_esolia_com_01
curl -X POST "http://util-02.esolia.com/flowdock/v2/flowdock.php?action=chat&chat_name=Auto-Script&chat_content=%40team%20Copied+files+to+ESOLIA.COM+site+via+rsync+including+commit+https%3A%2F%2Fgithub.com%2FeSolia%2FeSolia%2Fcommit%2F$LATESTSHA&chat_tags=esolia.com&flowdock_api=73d6f7%3Df83ad24ab6628fda5ca2b18fff349a5877a928O7o799"
}


function hugodeploy-esoliacojp {
cd /Users/rcogley/dev/eSolia
rm -rf /tmp/esolia.co.jp
export STYLECSS_HASH="$(git log -1 --format='%h' /Users/rcogley/dev/eSolia/static/css/style.css)"
export FEEDEKCSS_HASH="$(git log -1 --format='%h' /Users/rcogley/dev/eSolia/static/css/FeedEk-2.0.min.css)"
export FONTELLOCSS_HASH="$(git log -1 --format='%h' /Users/rcogley/dev/eSolia/static/css/fontello.min.css)"
export GHPMATCSS_HASH="$(git log -1 --format='%h' /Users/rcogley/dev/eSolia/static/css/ghpages-materialize.min.css)"

That’s either from the Mac to *nix, or from *nix to the Mac. It takes care of any character conversions needed and has worked for me for quite a while.

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