We switched our documentation static site generator from Jekyll to Hugo. Jekyll has long been our generator of choice given how easy it is to get up and running, and its simplicity with deploying to GitHub Pages.
Unfortunately, we’ve reached two major issues with Jekyll over the years:
- Jekyll requires Ruby to be installed
- Site generation was very slow
Hugo on the other hand is written in Go, so it has no external runtime dependencies, and it’s much faster. We build our current master branch site, including the doc’s Sass → CSS in ~1.6s. Our local server reloads in milliseconds instead of 8-12 seconds, so working on the docs has become a pleasant experience again.
The Hugo switch wouldn’t have been possible without Hugo’s main developer work, Bjørn Erik Pedersen (@bep), who made quite a few codebase changes to make the transition possible and smooth!
Also a shoutout to @xhmikosr who led the charge here in converting hundreds of files and working with the Hugo developers to make sure our local development was fast, efficient, and maintainable.
Welcome to Hugo! ʕ◔ϖ◔ʔ
Awesome contributions related to this migration by @XhmikosR also brought many enhancements to Hugo. Thanks.
Man, it was a great choice. I think that Hugo will bring to us many new astonishing things, then, just think that only switching to Hugo you have restored the pleasure of work in documentation again, what will come for you in the near future?
We also switched our v4.x docs, and I’m planning on switching our blog too 
Icons is already using Hugo.
And switching from BS4 to BS5 is much easier than from earlier versions… The only larger hurdle is the change from left/right to start/end due to RTL/LTR compatibility. I did change most of my websites over to BS5 now. The websites are happy and me too 
We still have to fix a few issues and we are admittedly a little slow, but we are also a few people. I hope we’ll ship beta2 the next week, and with some help from the community to iron out a few bugs, we’ll have the stable out soon