Publishing from hugo to dev.to

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I’ve been experimenting with syndicating parts of my blog to dev.to for extra reach. Since dev.to expects Markdown with Jekyll-style front matter, I put together a quick and dirty solution using Hugo’s output formats to solve two problems:

  • Render links as absolute (and use the extra link logic I use for various things)
  • Render code blocks correctly

My solution was basically to:

  • Define a jekyll output format (text/markdown) alongside the default HTML.
  • Add a simple single.jekyll.md template with front matter + {{ .Content }}.
  • Use Hugo’s render hooks (render-codeblock, render-link) to:
    • Re-emit fenced code blocks as triple backticks.
    • Ensure all links are absolute.

With that, every hugo build now gives me:

public/post/jekyll/index.md which I can paste straight into dev.to

Limitations: only some elements have render hooks, so the Markdown output still mixes in HTML. That’s fine for Forem, which renders both.

I have also not done anything about images (largely because I don’t really use them much)

Full write-up with config + templates

Would love any thoughts / suggestions / feedback

I love how flexible and easy hugo is to work with.

Thanks :slight_smile:

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